Birte Schnöink was born in Bremen in 1984. From 2006 until 2010, she studied acting at the Hochschule für Schauspielkunst "Ernst Busch" in Berlin. During that time she already appeared in several plays, including stagings of "Die Räuber" at the Berliner Schaubühne (2008) and "Verbrechen und Strafe" at the Salzburger Festspiele (2008).

Since 2009, she is a company player at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, where she performed in "Die Möwe", "Der zerbrochene Krug" and "Die Tragödie von Romeo und Julia". In 2014, she was awarded the Boy-Gobert-Preis for her theatre work.

Schnöink made her screen debut in a small role in Anna Justice's 2011 release "Die verlorene Zeit", followed by a part in the war drama "Lore". She got her first lead role in Jessica Hausner's "Amour Fou" (2014), which relates the fateful romance between poet Heinrich von Kleist and young mother Henriette Vogel. This performance earned her a nomination for the 2015 Austrian Film Award.

After a smaller role as a police inspector in the feature film "Am Ende ist man tot" (2015, theatrical release not until 2018), Birte Schnöink concentrated again in the next few years mainly on theatre and radio play work. In 2016, on the occasion of the ARD Radio Play Days, she received the German Radio Play Award for Best Acting Performance for her role in "Draußen unter freiem Himmel - Manifest 49"; in the following years, other radio plays and audio books in which she participated won awards. At the Thalia Theater she was seen in "Nathan the Wise" (2016), "Bilder deiner großen Liebe" (2017) and "Vor dem Fest" (2019), among others. She had a leading cinema role in the patchwork family and separation story "Die Einzelteile der Liebe" ("The Components of Love"), which premiered at the Berlinale 2019 in the Perspektive Deutsches Kino section. In September 2019, Birte Schnöink began working as a freelance actress. From then on, she also took on cinema and television roles more frequently again.

On television, she played a leading role in Sherry Hormann's highly acclaimed family chronicle "Altes Land" (2020). At the Munich Film Festival 2021, the mother-daughter drama "Das Mädchen mit den goldenen Händen" ("The Girl With the Golden Hands") premiered, starring Birte Schnöink and Corinna Harfouch. The film was released in February 2022.

Shortly before that, also in February 2022, the drama "Zum Tod meiner Mutter" ("The Death of My Mother") premiered at the Berlinale in the Encounters section, the story of a woman who stands by her dying mother. Birte Schnöink was on stage at the Theater Basel in 2021/22 in the play "Lost Illusions".