Lily Henriette Greenham (neé Lax) was born in Vienna, Austria in 1924. Although her formal education was in music, Greenham is best known for her involvement in optical and kinetic art and text-sound compositions.

Born to a Jewish family, Greenham moved to Denmark at an early age to escape the Nazi occupation. In 1948, she emigrated to Paris to study painting, where she came to meet poet Peter Greenham. After their marriage in 1951, the couple moved to Vienna. There, Lily attended the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna to study music. She began working with the Weiner Gruppe, an avant-garde group of Austrian writers and poets, for a series of performance pieces that would serve as her introduction to sound and concrete poetry. Upon her return to Paris in 1964, Greenham took a greater interest in kinetic and optical art, taking part in several exhibitions alongside the Groupe de Recherche D'Art Visuelle and the 'Nouvelle Tendence' movement. Her work “Three Variations: Study of Differentiation and Similarity in Visual Perception” was displayed in MoMA’s 1965 exhibition, The Responsive Eye, in New York. In 1972 Greenham moved to London to focus solely on sound poetry, there her collaboration with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop culminated in her award-winning album Relativity.

For the remainder of the 1970s and 80s, Lily performed across Europe as part of the Open Music Trio. During her later years, Lily continued experimenting with art through computer graphics programmes. Lily passed away in London on 31 October 2001. Lingual Music, a CD collection of her sound poetry, that features ‘Study of Differentiation and Similarity in Visual Perception’ as the cover, was posthumously released in 2007 by Paradigm Discs.