Martina Paatela-Nieminen gained her Doctorate of Arts from the University of Art and Design Helsinki, UIAH (nowadays, Aalto University) in 2001. She worked there as a Senior Research Associate in the School of Art Education from 1985 until 2006, of which the last two years she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Academy of Finland. She then worked as a university lecturer in Visual Arts Education in the Department of Applied Sciences of Education, Faculty of Behavioural Sciences, at the University of Helsinki from 2006–2008, and as a Senior Research Officer in the School of Art Education at UIAH from 2008–2009.

She also participated in a two-year project as Professor of Pedagogy in Arts and Crafts in the Savonlinna Department of Philosophy, in the school of Applied Educational Science and Teacher Education at the University of Eastern Finland from 2009-2011.

She then returned to the University of Helsinki and worked there as a university lecturer in the Faculty of Educational Sciences from 2011-2021. She has retired from this post but continues to work as an Associate Professor (Docent) in the field of art education at the University of Helsinki at the same time as being Associate Professor (Docent) in the field of visual culture education at Aalto University.

She has worked in the International Society for Education through Art, InSEA, first as the chair of InSEA Finland in 2006-2011, and later serving as a European Regional representative on the InSEA World Council in 2011-2014 and 2014-2017.

Her research interests are the postmodern art education, intertextual methodology, new media and intersubjective and intercultural projects.