Niels Bolbrinker was born in Hamburg in 1951. He studied photography and visual communications, and has been working as cinematographer and director since the mid-1970s. As DoP and editor, he received a German Film Prize for the documentary short "Tue recht und scheue niemand" in 1977.

Over the years, he completed several film projects – often working with co-directors – which took a socio-critical stance, including "Schade, daß Beton nicht brennt" (1981) and "Alles unter Kontrolle. Notizen auf dem Weg zum Überwachungsstaat" (1983). In 1986, he was awarded the Prize of German Film Critics for "Zwischenzeit", a documentary on the public protest against the construction of nuclear facilities in Lüchow-Dannenberg.

In 1995, "Original Wolfen. Aus der Geschichte einer Filmfabrik" marked the first of his collaborations with film scholar Kerstin Stutterheim. Together, they completed several feature length films, among them "Bauhaus – Mythos und Moderne" (1998) and "Die Thuranos – Leben auf dem Drahtseil" (2003). Apart from that, Bolbrinker continued to work as a DoP for film and television.

In 2009, Bolbrinker and Kerstin Stutterheim completed "Fliegen und Engel", a feature-length documentary on Russian artist Ilya Kabakov.

Bolbrinker portrayed a spectacular, ship-like building which was designed by architect Hans Scharoun and completed in 1933 in his TV documentary "Mit Licht gebaut – Ein Lebensschiff von Hans Scharoun" (2012). As a cinematographer, he worked on "Klänge des Verschweigens" (2013) which remembered musician Willi Heckmann (1897-1995) who was persecuted by the Nazis because of his homosexuality.

The 2014 Dok Fest Munich saw the premiere of Niels Bolbrinker's next feature film "Die Wirklichkeit kommt", in which he portrays individuals who suffer from a paranoid fear of being controlled by the state and also explores the workings of the modern surveillance industry.