Katharina Woll was born in Munich, Germany, in 1984. After graduating from high school, she spent several months in Ecuador, where she worked as an assistant to a German documentary filmmaker. From 2004 on she studied film and theatre studies as well as art history and politics in Erlangen, Munich and Buenos Aires (Argentina). At the same time, she worked on several film productions, including as a unit production manager on Claus Strigel's "Der Schein trügt - Eine Expedition in das Rätsel des Geldes" ("In What We Trust", 2009) and as an assistant director on Sibylle Dahrendorf's "Knistern der Zeit - Christoph Schlingensief und sein Operndorf in Burkina Faso" (2009-2012). In theater, she gained further experience as a trainee director with Armin Petras at the Thalia Theater Hamburg and with René Pollesch at the Münchner Kammerspiele.   

In 2010, Katharina Woll began her studies in directing at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin (dffb). There she made several short fiction and documentary films that screened at international festivals. Her live-action short "Ihr Sohn" ("Her Son", 2015), starring Sebastian Urzendowsky and Marie-Lou Sellem, premiered at the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival and was awarded the rating "besonders wertvoll" ("particularly valuable") by the Wiesbaden Filmbewertungsstelle (FBW). In addition, Woll has made commercials and social media spots, including one for the German Ministry of Family Affairs as part of a campaign against sexual violence among young people.  

Together with her fellow dffb student Florian Plumeyer, who had already written the screenplay for "Ihr Sohn", she wrote the screenplay for her graduation film "Alle wollen geliebt werden" ("Everybody Wants To Be Loved"), which premiered at the Munich Film Festival in June 2022. After further festival screenings, including at the Miami Film Festival 2023, "Alle wollen geliebt werden" was released in German theaters in March 2023.