Born in Brooklyn, New York, Lena Gurr was the daughter of Hyman and Ida (Gorodnick) Gurr. She attended the Maxwell Training School for Teachers from 1915 to 1917, then turned her energies toward art. She studied painting and printmaking at the Educational Alliance Art School in 1919, and at the Art Students League (1920-1922), where she was a student of John Sloan and Maurice Sterne. She also studied art in Paris, Nice, and Mentone, France. Her first solo exhibition was in 1932 at the Brooklyn Museum.
Gurr produced paintings, prints, and drawings of everyday scenes in a social realist style in the 1920s and early 1930s. She later incorporated the flat planes of cubism into her work. Even as her work became more abstract, Gurr retained a marked engagement with her subject matter. She learned screen printing and exhibited at the Serigraph Galleries in New York.
She exhibited widely in New York, with the Whitney Studio Club, Society of Independent Artists, New York Society of Women Artists, Salons of America, and Brooklyn Society of Artists, as well as showing at galleries and museums. The A.C.A. Gallery mounted solo shows of Gurr's work.
