Ulrike Ottinger (born in Konstanz in 1942) is a German filmmaker and photographer whose work challenges the conventions of art cinema. Trained as a painter, she combines stylization, fantasy and ethnographic elements in films that construct the image in an unusual way.
She began studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich in 1959. From 1962 to 1968 she worked as a freelance artist in Paris, where she studied etching with Johnny Friedlaender. In 1966 she wrote her first screenplay, Die Mongolische Doppelschublade. After returning to West Germany in 1969, she founded the film club Visuell in cooperation with the film seminar of the University of Konstanz, and later ran a gallery and a press devoted to contemporary artists.
From 1972 onward, Tabea Blumenschein and Magdalena Montezuma became lead actors in her films. Her style rejects linear plots in favour of long, lingering scenes and elaborate costumes, often designed by the actresses themselves. Joan of Arc of Mongolia (1989), starring Delphine Seyrig, was screened at the 39th Berlin International Film Festival.
She has also worked in the theatre, directing and designing stage productions of Elfriede Jelinek's plays in Stuttgart and Graz. As a visual artist, her solo show South East Passage (2003) at the Renaissance Society in Chicago was the first part of a two-part series on Eastern European video. Her later documentaries about various Asian regions reflect her interest in the Far East. In 2009 The New York Times described her as a avant-garde alternative to the melodramas of Wenders, Fassbinder and Herzog.
Her legacy is visible in a 2005 retrospective of her photographs, in Laurence Rickels's 2008 book on her work, and in the regular selection of her films at the Berlinale. In 2019 she was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and in 2020 she received the Berlinale Camera.