Sonya Winterberg was born in 1970 to Finnish-Swedish parents and grew up near Helsinki. After graduating from high school, she studied Scandinavian studies, German language and literature, and philosophy in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany; she also completed a master's degree in European Media at the University of Portsmouth, England. She then worked as a press officer for an international environmental organization in Brussels, followed by several years in the USA, where she worked as a journalist for various media. Back in Germany, Winterberg lived and worked in Berlin from 2005 to 2012. In 2010, she was nominated for the European Parliament Journalism Award. In June 2013, she was elected to the board of the Association of Women Journalists.   

In her journalistic work, Winterberg focuses primarily on the issues of war, trauma and displacement, often with a special focus on the situation of children. She has authored several books, including "Kriegskinder. Erinnerungen einer Generation" (2009, co-authored with her husband Yury Winterberg), "Wir sind die Wolfskinder. Verlassen in Ostpreußen" (2012), "Kleine Hände im Großen Krieg. Kinderschicksale des Ersten Weltkriegs" (2014, with Yury Winterberg) and "Kollwitz. Die Biografie" (2015). On Kollwitz, she also curated an exhibition at the Käthe Kollwitz Museum in Cologne in 2015 and realized the TV documentary "Kollwitz – Ein Leben in Leidenschaft" (2015). For these works she was honored with the Käthe Kollwitz Medal by the Friends of the Käthe Kollwitz Museum Berlin. In 2016, she realized a traveling exhibition about East Prussian war orphans, the so-called Wolfskinder.   

For her TV report "Kinderhandel. Mitten in Europa" (2018, together with Sylvia Nagel), Sonya Winterberg received a nomination for the German-French Journalism Award and was awarded the Alternative Media Award and the Media Award "Kinderrechte in der Einen Welt" by Kindernothilfe and the Journalism Award of the White Ring.   

Other reportages were "Eltern hinter Gittern" (2018) and "Medizinversuche in Auschwitz – Clauberg und die Frauen von Block 10" ("Made in Auschwitz: The Untold Story of Block 10", 2019), both in collaboration with Sylvia Nagel. The latter received the award for Best Documentary at the 2020 LA Femme International Film Festival in Beverly Hilly, USA.  

In 2019, Winterberg realized the first posthumous retrospective of photojournalist Anja Niedringhaus, who was killed in Afghanistan in 2014. The following year, she and Roman Kuhn began work on "Die Bilderkriegerin - Anja Niedringhaus," a feature film with documentary sections, for which Winterberg was responsible for the documentary direction. The film was released in German theaters in May 2022.   

Sonya Winterberg lives in Halifax, Canada; in 2021 she published the travel guide "Gebrauchsanweisung für Kanada".