Sandra Prechtel, born in Munich on January 25, 1969, studied literature, film and political science at the Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität in Munich from 1988 to 1990 and received her master's degree from the Freie Universität Berlin in 1997. She went on to live in Moscow for some time and worked as a freelance writer for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, among others. From 2000 to 2001, Prechtel completed an internship at the editorial department of Sender Freies Berlin.   

After working as an assistant on Fred Kelemen's "Frost" (1998), Sandra Prechtel made her first documentary with "ND Neues Deutschland" (2004, co-directed by Francois Rossier). This was followed by "Sportsfreund Lötzsch" (2008, together with Sascha Hilpert), which documents the career of the GDR cyclist Wolfgang Lötzsch and the reprisals against him by the Stasi.   

For the TV series "Mädchengeschichten" produced for 3sat, she made the socially critical short documentary "Die Ballkönigin" (2010), about a group of teenage girls dreaming of becoming professional soccer players and training in the streets of a run-down working-class district in Warsaw, surrounded by poverty, alcoholism and violence. This was followed by the documentary feature "Roland Klick - The Heart is a Hungry Hunter", which premiered in the Panorama section of the Berlinale 2013. For television, Prechtel made "Jazz oder: Die Lehre vom Fliegen" (2018), a portrait of the three musicians Maria Baptist (piano), Eva Klesse (drums), and Hendrika Entzian (double bass), who, as role models of a new jazz generation, are among the women shaking up the male domain of jazz music. At the 2022 Munich Film Festival, Prechtel presented the documentary "Liebe Angst," a haunting portrait of a woman and her mother whose experiences during the Holocaust have had a lasting impact on their lives and relationship. The film was released theatrically in March 2023.