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Katrin Seybold was born in Bromberg (today's Bydgoszcz, Poland) on July 14 1943. Growing up in Stuttgart, she enrolled as an art history major at Tübingen University in 1964. Having had first-hand film experiences in an experimental film club, she eventually dropped out of university ion 1968 and moved to Berlin, where she became a political activist. She lived in the women's commune at Türkenstraße and took part in protests, squatting actions and the founding of an anti-authoritarian kindergarten. In 1970, she made her first short documentary "Die wilden Tiere – Rote Knastwoche" with co-director Gerd Conradt, one of the eighteen expelled dffb students. The following year, she unsuccessfully applied at the dffb herself.
Seybold began to work for the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, taught classes at the TU Berlin and worked as actor and assistant director on films by Thomas Mauch, Hans Rolf Strobel and Edgar Reitz. In 1975, she relocated to Munich where she worked as a freelance at Eikon production company, developing programs for the ZDF network (including the magazine "Kontakte"), and directing short features and documentaries that mostly dealt with social issues, like "Gorleben" (1978).
After parting ways with Eikon for political reasons in 1979, Seybold and Peter Krieg founded their own production company Verleihgenossenschaft der Filmemacher. During the shoot of her first self-produced feature "Schimpft uns nicht Zigeuner" (1980; made for the TV youth program "Direkt"), she made the acquaintance of Sinte woman Melanie Splita. Until 1987, the two women collaborated on three more documentaries addressing the situation and discrimination of Sinte people, with Splita mostly acting as advisor and co-author: "Wir sind Sintikinder und keine Zigeuner" (1981), "Es ging Tag und Nacht, liebes Kind. Zigeuner (Sinti) in Auschwitz" (1982) and "Das falsche Wort. Wiedergutmachung an Zigeunern (Sinte) in Deutschland?" (1987). From 1981 on, Seybold also became an active member of the AG Dokumentarfilm and eventually became its representative on the federal film funding board. Yet when she publically condemned the political pressure put on the board by German conservative party CSU, she was expelled from the board. According to her own statements, she subsequently did not receive public film funding for almost twenty years.
Thus limited in her options, Seybold resorted to TV work. She made investigative feature reports and critical documentaries on historical figures like Luther ("Ein wild, roh, tobend Volk", 1983) and Friedrich the Great ("Gefahr für den König", 1986), while also working as a producer.
In 1986, Seybold met American filmmaker Emanuel Rund and subsequently produced several of his films on the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany. Among them, especially "'Alle Juden raus!' Judenverfolgung in einer deutschen Kleinstadt 1933-1945" (1990) garnered critical acclaim and won the Silver Hugo Award at the Chicago International Film Festival. Rund's films also stirred Seybold's interest to work on the subject as a director. Without public funding, she made "Mut ohne Befehl" (1994), a film about anit-fascist resistance fighters in Stuttgart, "Nein! - Zeugen des Widerstandes in München 1933 – 1945" (1998) and "Ludwig Koch - Der mutige Weg eines politischen Menschen" (2000).
Seybold, who married fellow filmmaker Thomas Harlan in 2003, eventually did get funding for the production of "Die Widerständigen - Zeugen der Weißen Rose" (2008). Yet despite positive reviews, the planned continuation of the documentary series did not receive further funding, which slowed down the productions process. While working on the next entry "Die Widerständigen 'also machen wir das weiter ...'" ("The Resistors 'their spirit prevails ...'"), which deals with less well-known members of the "Weiße Rose" resistance group, Katrin Seybold lost her long battle with cancer on July 27 2012. After her death, Seybold's friend Ula Stöckl completed the production on her behalf. "Die Widerständigen 'also machen wir das weiter ...'" premiered at the 2015 Berlin IFF and was released theatrically in May 2015.