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Byambasuren Davaa was born in 1971 in Ulan Bator, Mongolia. She worked 1989-1994 as a speaker and assistant director at Mongolian Public Television, studying law in Ulan Bator at the same time. She started studying at the Academy of Film Art there in 1998, moving in 2000 to the Academy of Television and Film (HFF) in Munich for documentary film. "Die Geschichte vom weinenden Kamel" ("The Story of the Weeping Camel"), which she made together with Luigi Falorni at the HFF, won awards worldwide, including the Bavarian Film Prize and a nomination for the 2005 Academy Award as Best Documentary.
The same year, Davaa's graduation project "Die Höhle des gelben Hundes" ("The Cave of the Yellow Dog") was released in Germany by X-Verleih. The film, a semi-documentary tale set in Mongolia, garnered several international awards and won the German Film Prize for Best Childrens Film. Davaa's third feature film was again set in Mongolia and also combined documentary observation and narrative fiction: "Das Lied von den zwei Pferden" ("The Two Horses of Genghis Khan", 2009) is the story of a singer who travels across Mongolia in her search for the lost lyrics of an old folk song. At the Camerimage festival in Łódź, Poland, the film's cinematographer, Martijn van Broekhuizen, won the Discovery Networks Central Europe Award.
In the next few years Davaa devoted herself to different projects. Among other things, she started working on two screenplays: the nomadic story "Die Adern der Welt" ("Veins of the World") and the children's film "Boroo und der Wolf" (together with Franziska Müller). The treatment for the latter received funding from the initiative Der besondere Kinderfilm. In 2017, Davaa presented the multimedia cycle "Meine Mongolei," in which she portrayed the endless expanse of the steppe and the people who live in close touch with nature. The program was shown at several venues throughout Germany.
In the fall of 2018, filming began on "Die Adern der Welt", her first fictional feature film. It premiered at the 2020 Berlinale in the Generation Kplus competition. At the 2021 Geneva International Film Festival and Forum for Human Rights (FIFDH), the film won the Fiction Grand Award and the Youth Jury Prize. The German theatrical release took place in summer 2021.