Otto Briese was born in Iași and trained at the Academy of Fine Arts there under C. D. Bardasare and Gheorghe Popovici. In 1909 he was awarded the Lecomte de Noüy Prize by the Romanian Academy for drawing, which enabled him to continue his studies abroad in Vienna and Munich. This European formation, combined with his Moldavian academic grounding, informed a practice distinguished above all by its chromatic sensibility, Briese being recognized by his contemporaries as an accomplished colorist. He exhibited alongside Nicolae Tonitza and Ștefan Dimitrescu, artists with whom he shared both institutional and artistic affinities.

In 1918, together with C. Bacalu, A. Băeșu, and Ștefan Dimitrescu, he co-founded the association Arta Românească (Romanian Art), a grouping explicitly oriented against academicism and toward a more direct engagement with contemporary pictorial currents. He joined the faculty of the Academy of Fine Arts in Iași in 1933 and was appointed its director in 1945, a position that placed him at the center of artistic education in Moldova during a period of significant institutional transition. He was also a founding member of the Flacăra circle.

Over the course of his career he held 36 solo exhibitions, in addition to his participation in group shows, and worked in parallel as a drawing teacher in Vaslui and Iași from 1912 onward.