Van der Molen studied architecture and design atAcademie Minerva in Groningen, Netherlands, then photography both there and atHunter College, City University of New York, New York City.[1][2] In 2003 she gained an MFA in photography atAcademy of Art and Design St. Joost in Breda, Netherlands.[1]
Between 2000 and 2003, van der Molen made portraits of charismatic women she met on the streets of Manhattan, later switching to people judged by different criteria.[3] After that she turned to photographing anonymous buildings at the edge of the city.[3] Since 2009, she has concentrated on the natural world, travelling alone to remote places in order to make the work.[3][4][5] She makes black and white prints in her own darkroom.[4][5] Van der Molen's first book,Sequester (2014), "photographed throughout the whole of Europe"[6] including the volcanicCanary Islands,[5] contains monochromatic "landscapes, at times abstractly rendered to the point of dissolving into abstractions [. . . ] often obliterating all sense of the physical scale that was in front of the camera, many of them using very narrow ranges of tonality, from the blackest black to maybe a dark grey".[7]Blanco (2017) contains photographs of desolate landscapes and trees.The Living Mountain (2020) is "a book about land, solitude and the planet we inhabit."[8]Sean O'Hagan andJörg Colberg have praised the quality of her prints.[5][7]
