Leysen was the first director of art centre
deSingel in
Antwerp, from 1980 to 1991. Together with Guido Minne she founded the
Kunstenfestivaldesarts in
Brussels in 1994. The first edition of the festival took place in May 1994. Under her direction the festival became an internationally-acclaimed major event for Belgian and international performing artists. In 2007 she organised Meeting Points 5, a multidisciplinary festival taking place in nine different Arabic cities (
Amman,
Damascus,
Beirut,
Ramallah,
Cairo,
Alexandria,
El Minia,
Tunis, and
Rabat), as well as in Brussels and
Berlin. She curated the
Theater der Welt in 2010, was an artistic director at
Berliner Festspiele in 2010-12, and was the artistic director of the
Wiener Festwochen in 2013–14. She curated the performing arts program of Homeworks 7 in
Beirut in 2015. ==Death==