Rosa von Praunheim, born November 25, 1942, in Riga, during the German occupation under his real name Holger Radtke, grew up with his adoptive parents in East Berlin under the name Holger Bernhard Bruno Mischwitzky. After the escape to West Germany in 1953, the family lived at first in the Rhineland and eventually settled in Frankfurt am Main. In Frankfurt, von Praunheim attended a classical language high school but left already after finishing secondary school level. He started to study painting at Offenbach"s Werkkunstschule (today: Hochschule für Gestaltung – HfG). One year later, he transferred to Berlin"s Hochschule für Bildende Künste but did not graduate any of his studies. At this time, during the 1960s, he assumed his stage name Rosa von Praunheim, as reminiscence to his Frankfurt quarter Praunheim and to the "Rosa Winkel" (pink triangle) – the symbol, homosexuals had to wear in the concentration camps during the Third Reich.

In 1967, Rosa von Praunheim made his movie debut with the short film "Von Rosa von Praunheim". He sold the film to Hessischer Rundfunk and by doing so was able to fund further movie projects. Until the end of the 1960s, he finished short and experimental films like "Grotesk – Burlesk, Pittoresk" (1968), "Schwestern der Revolution" (1969), and "Samuel Beckett"(1969). His feature film debut, the relationship story "Die Bettwurst" (1970) that was filmed with lay actors and nearly no budget at all immediately became a cult film. In the same year, Praunheim caused a stir that went far beyond the gay scene with his documentary film "Nicht der Homosexuelle ist pervers, sondern die Situation in der er lebt" ("It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives") – virtually overnight, von Praunheim turned into an icon of the German gay movement that experienced a downright boom through the film.

During the following years, Rosa von Praunheim"s feature and documentary films were mainly influenced by three thematic domains: the life stories of vital older women, for instance, in "Unsere Leichen leben noch" ("Our Corpses Still Live", 1981), homosexuality and AIDS ("Ein Virus kennt keine Moral" ("A Virus Knows No Morals"), 1985), and the city of New York ("Überleben in New York" ("Survival in New York"), 1989). In 1991, he caused a scandal with his "outing" campaign: In a move that attracted high media attention, von Praunheim revealed several German celebrities who had kept their homosexuality a secret. With this morally dubious campaign, von Praunheim, on his own admission, wanted to call attention to the neglected problem of AIDS and to double standards in society. Besides bizarre, postmodern-seeming feature films like "Der Einstein des Sex" ("The Einstein of Sex", 1998/99), von Praunheim mainly turned to (semi-)documentary projects from the early 1990s on. Different aspects of homosexual life are still his main topics, from "Ich bin meine eigene Frau" ("I Am My Own Woman", 1991/92) to the history of the German cross dresser movement in the 20th century, from "Männer, Helden, schwule Nazis" (2004/05) to homosexual right wing extremists and to "Tote Schwule – lebende Lesben" ("Dead Gay Men and Living Lesbians", 2007/08) about homosexuals from different generations.

Von Praunheim did not learn until the year 2000 that he grew up with adoptive parents. After his foster-mother died in 2003, he went on an intensive search for traces of his own roots that he documented in his overly personal film "Meine Mütter – Spurensuche in Riga" ("Two Mothers - The Search Began in Riga", 2006/07).

Besides his work as a filmmaker, Rosa von Praunheim has also worked as a fiction and non-fiction writer and a poet since the 1960s. Until 2006, he taught film directing at Potsdam"s Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film.