 Lien was born in Arendal, a town on the southern Norwegian island of Tromøya, where she grew up as the youngest of six children and the only girl in her family.She earned a bachelor's degree from McGill University in 1979, and completed her Ph.D. in 1984 from the University of Iowa.Her dissertation, "Construction of High Dimensional Knot Groups from Classical Knot Groups", was supervised by Jonathan Kalman Simon.