Dorothea Maetzel-Johannsen was a German avant-garde painter.
Dorothea Johannsen went to Hamburg trade school for girls. She was a teacher in Schleswig until 1910 when she married the Hamburg architect and painter de:Emil Maetzel. As a married woman, she was no longer allowed to work as a teacher in the Wilhelminian Empire and had to give up the job.

She gave birth to four children: Ruth 1911, Bogumil 1913, Peter 1915, and Monika 1917.

Maetzel-Johannsen died on February 8, 1930 at the age of 44 years after an operation for heart weakness. A gravestone for Dorothea Maetzel-Johannsen and her husband is located in the Ohlsdorf cemetery, Planquadrat S 12 (near Chapel 1).

Between 1911 and 1918 Maetzel-Johannsen traveled repeatedly to Berlin. During the First World War she took classes from Lovis Corinth. After the war, together with her husband, Maetzel-Johannsen was one of the co-founders of the Hamburg Secession.

In 1921, Maetzel-Johannsen moved into her own studio in Hamburg. Here works were made, in which she emphasized the surface effect of the paintings more strongly. At the same time she was concerned with the New Objectivity, which began to spread throughout Germany in the mid-1920s.

In 1923 she commissioned the painting for wall paintings in the Kunsthalle Hamburg. In 1925 she stayed in Paris and Chartres for six months. In France, she took a variety of new ideas for her work back to Germany, which should be used in the last five years of her work.

In 1930, Maetzel-Johannsen worked on a commissioned design for a ceiling painting in the Hamburg Planetarium, but she died before the design could be executed.