Larysa Esman (nee Lebedzeva) was born in Minsk in 1936 in the family of a journalist. She graduated from Belarusian Polytechnic Institute in 1959, with one of the first architecture classes. While a student, she met her husband Igar Esman, a future prominent Belarusian architect. 

Larysa Esman spent her entire professional career at Minskpraekt, where she came upon graduating in 1959 and where she eventually rose to the position of the head architect of projects. In 1985, for her work on the General Plan of the Development of Minsk until the Year 2000, Esman received the prize of the Council of Ministers of the USSR (the team included, in addition to Esman,  Yu. Puretsky, V. Korol, Yu. Grigoriev, Ya. Linevich, N. Gordienko, I. Levko, D. Grishin, E. Dyatlov, G. Belikov, T. Fadeeva, Vasilisa Shylnikouskaya, L. Gafo, E. Svetlova, Natallya Afanasyeva, V. Chesnov, L. Larina, D. Zhuravleva, N. Soklolovsky, V. Varaksin, A. Stazaeva).

In the early 1960s, Esman participated in the design of the General Plan of the Development of Minsk until the Year 1980. Her other projects of the decade include the planning of residential district on Kharkiv street in Minsk (with Iryna Ioda) and the planning of Serabranka district in Minsk (with Natallya Afans’eva and Rimma Andreeva). During the 1970s, Esman worked on the planning of the South-West district of Minsk (with D. Zhuravleva) and of the residential district on the Soviet Border Guards street (with D. Zhurvleva and E. Romm). In 1979-1982 Esman, as a member of a larger team, worked on the award-winning General Plan of the Development of Minsk until the Year 2000. During the 1980s, Esman continued to design (as a part of a team) microdistricts in Minsk, including Urychcha (1982), Dvoryshche-2 (1983), Shabany (1984), Loshytsa (1988), Sukharava (1985), and Novy Dvor (1989). In independent Belarus in the 1990s, Esman worked on the preservation of the historic urban environment of Minsk.