Snow Hnin Ei Hlaing was born on July 20, 1985 in Kyaukpyu, Myanmar (Burma). She gained her first experience at a television station at the age of 18. Eventually she attended the private Yangon Film School and studied as an exchange student the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg in Ludwigsburg, Germany. From 2006, when Myanmar was still under the military regime, she was involved in numerous documentary film projects as an editor and sound technician, often dealing with topics such as poverty, human trafficking or women's empowerment. She also worked as a manager and mentor at the Yangon Film School.

She made her first own short documentary film with "Puppets Beyond Borders" (2011), about a puppetry workshop led by Germans in Chiang Mai, Thailand. The same year's "Burmese Butterfly" (2011), about a young hairdresser and his coming out in restrictive Myanmar, screened at numerous international festivals. Other short documentaries included "The Potter's Song" (2013), a portrait of a community of potters in Myanmar, and (as co-director) the ARTE TV production "Die Lotosweberinnen vom Inlesee" ("The Lotus Weavers of Inle Lake", 2017).

In 2016, Snow Hnin Ei Hlaing began work on the documentary feature "Midwives," a German-Canadian-Myanmar co-production. In it, she observed over six years (and amid escalating violence in the country) the work of a Buddhist midwife and a Muslim midwife working together in an improvised clinic, regardless of their ethnic affiliations, to provide medical care to the Rohingya in Rakhine State in Myanmar. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2022, where it won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award. Numerous other festival screenings and several awards followed. The German release was in January 2023, and "Midwives" was named Film of the Month by the Evangelische Filmarbeit jury.