Iris Dressler studied art history, philosophy, and literature in Marburg and Bochum. In 1996, she founded with Hans D. Christ the Hartware MedienKunstverein in Dortmund, which she directed until 2004. From 2002 to 2004, she also worked as curator at the Museum am Ostwall Dortmund.
Since 2005, she is co-director of the Württembergischer Kunstverein (WKV) Stuttgart with Hans D. Christ. One of the main focuses here is to explore collaborative, transnational and transdisciplinary forms of curating. Dressler and Christ have presented at the WKV solo exhibitions of artists such as Stan Douglas (in colaboration with Staatsgalerie Stuttgart), Anna Opperman (curator: Ute Vorkoeper), Antoni Muntadas, Daniel G. Andújar, Teresa Burga (curator: Miguel Lopez), Michael Borremans, Pedro G. Romero (co-curator: Valentín Roma), Rabih Mroué (curator: Cosmin Costinas), Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag, or Ines Doujak and realized collaborative exhibition projects such as On Difference (2005 and 2006), Subversive Practices (2009), Acts of Voicing or The Beast and the Sovereign.
Since 2014 Dressler teaches regularly as an associate lecturer at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart. She largely published texts on contemporary art and its politicial and theoretical contexts.