Mathilde Bonnefoy was born in Paris on March 11th 1972. In 1990, she enrolled as a philosophy student at the renowned Sorbonne, but one year later she left the university and moved to Berlin. From 1995 on, she edited music videos for artists like Rammstein and Udo Lindenberg.

In 1997, she worked as assistant editor on Wolfgang Becker's "Das Leben ist eine Baustelle". On this occassion, she made the aquaintance of Tom Tykwer, who asked her to edit "Lola Rennt" – for which she won the 1999 German Film Award for Film Editing. Since then, she has been a close collaborator of Tykwer: She edited "Der Krieger und die Kaiserin", "Heaven", "True", Tykwer's segments in "Paris je t'aime" and "Deutschland 09" and "The International".

Moreover, Bonnefoy worked with Wim Wenders on a couple of films, including the documentary "The Soul of a Man". Between 2003 and 2008, she also directed shorts and documentaries for television. In 2011, she again won the German Film Award, this time for her work on Tom Tykwer's "Drei".