From age 11, Alice Trübner (née Auerbach), daughter of an English mother and a German father, grew up in Frankfurt am Main. She studied at the drawing school of the Munich Association of Female Artists under Ludwig Schmid-Reutte in the mid-1890s, and is said to have had her own studio in Munich thereafter. Around 1899/1900, she took private lessons at the Städelsche Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt from Wilhelm Trübner, whom she then married in 1900. There, she also met her classmate Else Luthmer as well as Ottilie W. Roederstein, who rented the studio next door to her.
From 1903, the couple and their son Jörg lived in Karlsruhe. By 1901, at the latest, Alice Trübner exhibited her works regularly, including at exhibitions with the Munich and Berlin Secession, as well as at both the Frankfurt and the Munich Art Association. She was also featured several times in special exhibitions in Cologne, Zurich, Vienna and in one organised by the association La Libre Esthétique in Brussels. Apart from portraits and landscapes, Trübner painted primarily still lifes. She also campaigned for the funding of the arts and literature, among others in the Frauenbund zur Ehrung rheinländischer Dichter, of which she was also the third chair. Furthermore, Alice and Wilhelm Trübner were close friends with the art dealer and publisher Paul Cassirer and his wife Tilla Durieux. In 1916, Trübner shot herself in a hotel in Berlin – apparently out of unrequited love for Durieux.