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Benjamin Heisenberg was born in Tübingen in 1974. After finishing school he studied sculpture at Munich's Akademie der Bildenden Künste from 1993 to 1999. In addition, he enrolled in the director's class of Munich's Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen in 1997. Then, in 1998, he – together with Christoph Hochhäusler and Sebastian Kutzli – established "Revolver", a movie magazine with essays and interviews on developments and important persons of the German and international film scene.
At the same time, Heisenberg exhibited video installations in Munich galleries and museums. In 1999, he received the Leonard and Ida Wolf memorial prize, as well as a municipal prize for plastic arts of the city of Munich. After several short and experimental films, Heisenberg and Christoph Hochhäusler wrote the script to "Milchwald" ("This Very Moment", 2003), which was directed by Hochhäusler.
"Schläfer" is Heisenberg's first feature film and his final project for Munich HFF. In it, Heisenberg tells the story of a young postgraduate who – after a momentous and questionable decision-making process – agrees to collaborate with the secret service in order to spy on an Algerian colleague, a suspected terrorist. The film was shown in the section "Un Certain Regard" of the Cannes Film Festival and received the First Steps Awards in the category of "feature film".
Heisenberg’s second feature film was invited into the competition of the 2010 IFF Berlin: Based on true events, "Der Räuber" is the story of a marathon runner and bank robber, who plans his crimes with the precise focus of a professional athlete."Der Räuber" garnered Heisenberg the Bavarian Film Award for Best New Director and the 2011 Austrian Film Award for Best Director.
His next feature film "Über-Ich und Du", a comedy about two highly unlike men who have to live together, premiered in the Panorama section of the 2014 Berlin IFF.
In the years that followed, Benjamin Heisenberg focused primarily on his work as a visual artist. In 2015, for the newly opened NS Documentation Center in Munich, he collaborated with his brother Emanuel and artist Elisophie Eulenburg on an art installation featuring cinematic text-image collages. Using original documents from both perpetrators and victims of the Nazi era, the work, titled "Brienner 45", references the exhibition site—the former Braunes Haus in Munich.
Until 2018, Heisenberg presented several exhibitions of his diverse works and video pieces in cities such as Berlin, Graz, and Salzburg. In September 2022, he published his first novel, "Lukusch", which earned him a nomination for the emerging talent award at the Harbourfront Literature Festival in Hamburg.
Between 2015 and 2023, Heisenberg directed numerous short films and videos, as well as the feature-length documentary "Karate Do" (2017). His 22-minute short film "Er so sie so" (2023) won the Bildrausch Short Film Award at the Basel Film Festival.
In July 2024, Heisenberg began filming his first full-length feature since "Über-Ich und Du" (2014): the children’s film "Der Prank – April, April!" ("Prank"), which he co-wrote with Peer Klehmet. The story follows a twelve-year-old boy and his Chinese exchange student, who find themselves swept into a wild adventure after an April Fools' prank goes wrong. The film was released in cinemas in May 2025.