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Ruth Olshan was born in 1970 in Moscow, Russia (then the Soviet Union) to Ukrainian-Lithuanian parents. The family emigrated to Israel in 1971 and moved to West Berlin in 1974. As a schoolgirl, Olshan received private acting lessons (1986-89); from 1989 to 1991, she studied theater and film at the FU Berlin; in 1992, she appeared in a short film. But then Olshan seemed to take a different career path and trained as a publishing clerk from 1992 to 1994. In the end, she came to the film industry through a scholarship that allowed her to study film at the Northern School of Film & Television in Leeds, England, from 1996 to 1998.
Back in Germany, she studied directing and film production at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM) from 1998 to 2001. During this time, she made several short films, including "Der Handstand" (2000), for which she received the Short Film Award of the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation and an Honorable Mention at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen 2001. Olshan made her first feature-length film with the television production "Savannah" (2002), about a teenage girl who is introduced by her friend to the seemingly glamorous world of professional models.
In the following years, Olshan made several documentaries: In the poetic "Tanz der Saris" (2003), she combined an insight into the art of Indian sari fabric with the portrait of a dancer; in "Wie Luft zum Atmen" ("Like Air To Breathe", 2005), which premiered at the Locarno Film Festival, she undertook an ethnomusicological journey into the world of Georgian musical culture; in "Nicht ganz koscher" ("Being Kosher", 2010), she took a humorous look at Jewish purity formulas.
In 2007, Olshan and Heike Fink received the Münster.Land Screenwriting Award for their joint project "Emmas Käsebrot"; in 2009, they were nominated for the German Screenwriting Award. However, it would be many years before the screenplay was made into a movie. She published her first novel "All die schönen Dinge" in 2015, followed by the short story collection "#herzleer" in 2017.
Together with Angela Gilges, Ruth Olshan wrote the script for the TV drama "Ich gehöre ihm" ("Loverboy", 2017), about a teenage girl who falls into the clutches of a 'lover boy' pimp. A major success was the award-winning TV movie "Aufbruch in die Freiheit" (2018, directed by Isabel Kleefeld), written by Olshan, Heike Fink and Andrea Stoll, about a woman who joins the protests against the anti-abortion Paragraph 218 of the German criminal code in 1971.
In 2020, under Olshan's direction, the screenplay "Emmas Käsebrot" finally went into production: under the new title "Himbeeren mit Senf" ("Raspberries with Mustard"), the youth film premiered at the Amsterdam Cinekid Festival in October 2021, with the German theatrical release following in April 2023. Shortly before that, in March 2023, her TV drama "Wolfswinkel" was broadcast, about a Brandenburg police officer whose best friend becomes involved in right-wing extremism.
In addition to her work as a filmmaker, Ruth Olshan works as a lecturer at various universities in Germany and abroad. Since 2018, she has been teaching as a professor of directing at the International Film School (ifs) Cologne.