Van Cline’s art process combines photosensitive and cast glass. After visiting Kodak, 1979, she began to utilize a film emulsion on glass, while completing her MFA at Massachusetts College of Art, Boston. In 1983, she was an inaugural fellow at Wheaton Glass Industries, NJ, helping to develop a program allowing artists in their glass factory, and was invited back as a Masterwork artist, 1990. In 1987, she was the youngest artist awarded the NEA/Japan-US Friendship Commission Award, where she traveled while photographing Japan for six months. She won the Fujita Prize, at the inaugural opening of the Glasmuseum in Denmark, 1988. In 1993, she was commissioned by Arts America, a branch of USIA to fabricate a large glass installation that traveled to 14 venues in S.E. Asia, after its inaugural opening at Cincinnati Art Museum. One of 13 Americans, she was included in Aperto Vetro, Museo Correr, Venice, Italy, 1996, co-curated by the British/Italian Government. In 1998, she won the Grand Prize at Kanazawa Museum, Japan. In 2001, she worked with Dupont Industries Headquarters, developing photographic imagery encasing safety glass for a large commission at a private residence in Tel Aviv.

Using industry is an important part of her creative technique, whether it is an aerospace industry etching photographs on seven feet bronze slabs, using an intelligent computer lighting system to project her moving images up to 50 feet in height, or being invited into Schott North American Glass Industries to use their glass furnaces to cast photosensitive glass prisms for her architectural scale photo vessels. In 2007, wanting to expand her realistic glass castings, she moved close to a bronze foundry to learn mold-making techniques, which she adapted to fabricate life-sized figures into ivory sugar glass, a process she created using time-heat compression in a kiln. A detailed interview of her art journey was recorded in 2010 for the Oral History Program, National Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.