Sung-Hyung Cho was born in Busan in South Korea in 1966. She studied communications in Seoul, followed by art history, media studies and philosophy in Marburg in 1989. 1999/2000 she attended a course on electronic images at Offenbach College of Design. She has made documentaries and music videos, and has also worked as a freelance editor and technician.

Her first feature-length film "Full Metal Village" about Wacken open air festival won the Schleswig-Holstein and Hesse film awards in 2006 and the Max Ophüls Award in 2007.  Her next documentary "Endstation der Sehnsüchte" ("Home from Home") premiered at Berlin Film Festival 2009, followed by "11 Freundinnen" about the German women's football team and the world championship 2011, which opened in cinemas in May 2013.

For the TV-documentary series "16 x Germany - People - Places - Stories" (2013) Sung-Hyung Cho realized the episode about Hessen. Her next feature documentary premiered in March 2015 at the Lichter Film Festival in Frankfurt: "Verliebt, Verlobt, Verloren" (theatrical release: June, 2015) told of women from East Germany who fell in love with students from North Korea in the 1950s and established families with them – until the young men were ordered to go back home by their regime.

The following year, "Meine Brüder und Schwestern im Norden" ("My Brothers and Sisters in the North") had its premiere at the Lichter Film Festival. In this documentary Sung-Hyung Cho tried to portray the daily life of people in tightly controlled North Korea. At the Lichter Film Festival the film was awarded the prize for the Best Regional Feature Film. At the Film Festival Mecklenburg-Vorpommern 2016 it received the prize for the Best Documentary (ex aequo with "Parchim International"). In July 2016 "Meine Brüder und Schwestern im Norden" was released theatrically in Germany.