A German director and photographer, she was born in Constance, Germany. She is the daughter of journalist Her parents were the journalist Maria Weinberg and Ulrich Ottinger, a painter. She studied art in Munich, Germany, in 1959 and worked as a painter and photographer in Paris. She also presented several plays with the Austrian novelist Elfriede Jelinek in Graz, Austria. Her directing credits include Ticket of No Return (1979) and Joan of Arc of Mongolia (1989).