Elwira Niewiera was born in Racibórz, Poland in 1976. She studied acting at the theatre academy in Gardzienice, Poland, and then moved to Berlin in 2003, where she worked as a researcher for a number of documentary film productions. "Bulgarian Stories" (PL/DE 2007), co-directed with Kornel Miglus, was her first documentary feature. From 2008 to 2015, she was CEO of the German-Polish cultural foundation Nowa Ameryka. Her second documentary feature "Domino Effekt" ("Domino Effect", PL/DE 2014), co-directed with Piotr Rosołowski, is about a Russian woman, who follows the love of her life to Abkhazia, where people are hostile to her and ostracize her. The film was screened at numerous international festivals and won several awards, e.g. at the Krakow Film Festival, the Budapest International Documentary Festival and at the International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film to name but a few.

Three years later, Niewiera and Rosołowski presented their second joint documentary film: "Der Prinz und der Dybbuk" ("The Prince and the Dybbuk", PL/DE 2017) portrays the renowned Polish-Jewish filmmaker Michał Waszyński, who fled the Nazis during the Second World War and who tried to hide his Jewish origins as well as his homosexuality his whole life. In Venice, the film won the Venice Classics Award for Best Documentary. In June 2018, "Der Prinz und der Dybbuk" was released in German cinemas.