Berlein has worked as an artist for 25 years, focusing primarily on painting, but has also worked with print, video, photography, music and sculptural mediums.

In 2010, together with Francois Irvine, she opened the Haas Collective in Cape town, South Africa. The Collective strives to build a platform for emerging artists to showcase their work to the public and link up with more established art galleries and  collectors.

Between 2008 and 2012, she established the Art buying department for Cecile and Boyd Design.

Berlein has exhibited and curated extensively in South Africa and abroad.

Berlein’s portrait and figurative work is well known. Twice she has been a finalist in the SPI National Portrait award, and her work is widely collected.

In her portrait/figurative work, she sets out to capture iconic qualities she recognises within the character of her subjects. Her work is primarily concerned with portraying, capturing and exploring human emotional response to self, and to one another, and the fragility and beauty that exists within humanity.

Berlein’s abstract paintings draw inspiration in material use largely from geology and the formation and colour of minerals and rock. More recently she has begun to incorporate thread and stitching in an emotional response to her identity.

Her landscape work is an extension of her abstract works wherein she utilizes similar materials, such as metal leafing, powdered pigments and glazes. The landscapes are an emotional and often melancholic response to the landscape in her country, often evoking a sense of desolate beauty, devoid of humans and yet evocative of human memory and longing.