Regina Ziegler was born in Quedlinburg on March 8 1944. Already at an early age, her mother – a journalist and film critic – took her along to screenings, thus fostering her love for the movies. Following her high school graduation in 1964, she and her later husband Hartmut Ziegler moved to Berlin, where she enrolled in law school with the purpose of becoming a judge. Yet she dropped out after one semester and instead took on different jobs at the SFB television network, eventually becoming a production assistant.

In 1973, at the age of 29, she founded her own production company. Her very first film "Ich dachte, ich wäre tot" was also the directorial debut of Wolf Gremm. Ziegler and Gremm would eventually marry in 1979, and she produced several more of his works, including "Fabian", "Kamikaze 1989" starring Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and "Nancy und Frank" ("Nancy & Frank: A Manhattan Love Story"). She also produced films by Ulrich Schamoni, Rosa von Praunheim, Helma Sanders-Brahms, Jeanine Meerapfel, Jean-Marie Straub and Andrzej Wajda.

To this day, Regina Ziegler oversaw more than 200 feature film productions, plus numerous television dramas, miniseries, shows and documentaries. She initiated the short film series "Erotic Tales", which featured woks by renowned international filmmakers like Nicolas Roeg, Ken Russell, Hal Hartley and Susan Seidelman. Among her best known theatrical releases are the erotic thriller "Solo für Klarinette ("Solo For Clarinet", 1998), "Unkenrufe" (2005), the period drama "Henri 4" ("Henry of Navarre"), Ulrich Schamoni's autobiographical essay film "Abschied von den Fröschen", the comedy "Frisch gepresst" ("Freshly Squeezed", 2012) and the musical spoof "Im weissen Rössl – Wehe du singst" (2013). The first season of Ziegler's TV series "Weissensee" went on to win the German Television Award for Best Series, and the biopic "Der Mann mit dem Fagott" (2011) garnered the German Television Award for Best Miniseries and the Austrian "Romy" for Best Television Drama.

During her career, Regina Ziegler herself received numerous national and international commendations, including the Federal Cross of Merit, the German film Award, the Grimme-Award, the Berlinale Kamera of the Berlin IFF, and the American Cinema Foundation Award. In 2006, the New York Museum of Modern Art honoured her with a retrospective.

Her company Regina Ziegler Filmproduktion was reorganized into Ziegler Film GmbH & Co. KG in 2000. The internationally active company remains an independent, family-run business, managed by Regina Ziegler and her daughter Tanja Ziegler. Since 2011, the two also run the Berlin arthouse cinema Filmkunst 66.

In 2016, Regina Ziegler was awarded the honorary prize at the German Film Awards for her outstanding services to German film. In October 2017, she published her autobiography "Geht nicht gibt's nicht" (in collaboration with author Andrea Stoll). The following year, she received the prestigious Carl Laemmle Producer Award for her life's work.

But the then 74-year-old was far from thinking about retirement. Over the next few years, Ziegler worked as a producer on films including the award-winning box office success "Ich war noch niemals in New York" (2019), the ambitious docudrama "Die Bilderkriegerin - Anja Niedringhaus" ("Anja - Life on the Frontline", 2022) and Andreas Dresen's "In Liebe, Eure Hilde" ("From Hilde, With Love"), a drama about the fate of Nazi resistance fighter Hilde Coppi.