Gallery
All Pictures (26)Biography
Devrim Lingnau was born in Mannheim in 1998 to a German mother and a Turkish father. While still at school, she attended the Academy of Dance at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Mannheim. She made her acting debut in 2014 in some reenacted scenes of the true crime show "Aktenzeichen XY... ungelöst!". A little later she got her first leading role in the third and fourth season of the youth mystery series "Fluch des Falken" (2014-2015), as a peppy German-Turkish girl. In the much praised two-parter "Verlorene Sicherheit" (2017), an episode of the crime series "Unter Verdacht", she was also cast to play a German Turk. She had guest roles in the TV series "Die Kanzlei" (2017) and in the web series "Immortality" (2017).
After graduating from high school in 2017 Lingnau stood in front of the camera for her first leading role in a feature film: In the British production "Carmilla", a romantic mystery drama, she played the title role. The premiere took place at the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2019. Also in 2019 she appeared in the TV crime thrillers "In Wahrheit: Still ruht der See" as a member of a mysterious youth clique and in "Der Bozen Krimi - Gegen die Zeit" as a young kidnapper. She then had a leading role in another feature film, "Auerhaus" (2019, directed by Neele Leana Vollmar), about a clique of high school graduates who start a rural flat-sharing community full of idealism but soon are faced with the limits of their shared dream.
In 2020, she appeared in "Allmen und das Geheimnis der Erotik" (2021), an episode of the "Allmen" TV film series directed by Thomas Berger. In it, she plays the admired descendant of a famous porcelain merchant who becomes entangled in a delicate art theft through the suave art detective Johann Friedrich von Allmen.
Lingnau gained international recognition for her portrayal of Empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary ("Sisi") in the acclaimed Netflix historical series "The Empress" (2022), which won the award for Best Drama Series at the 51st International Emmy Awards. For her performance as the monarch, Lingnau received the 2023 German Acting Award (Deutscher Schauspielpreis) in the Rising Star category.
In Kim Lea Sakkal's short film "Immaculata" (2024), she played a young housemaid who becomes pregnant despite never having had sex. The film was nominated for the Audience Short Film Award at the 57th Hof International Film Festival, however it ended up losing against Emma Bading's "Shut Up and Suffer".
Also in 2024, Lingnau took on the role of German archaeologist and mathematician Maria Reiche. In Damien Dorsaz's biographical feature film "Lady Nazca," she explores the ancient geoglyphs of the Nazca Desert in Peru — the furrowed lines and figures that stretch across entire hillsides, created by the long-vanished Nazca culture.
At the 2025 Berlinale, Lingnau was selected as Germany's representative among the European Shooting Stars, a program organized by European Film Promotion (EFP) that honors ten up-and-coming actors from across Europe. Her next major role came in Mehmet Akif Büyükatalay's psychological thriller "Hysteria" (2025), in which she plays an ambitious production intern working on a film about racist arson attacks in 1990s Germany. When a Qur'an is accidentally burned on set and a fateful mistake follows, she becomes caught in a web of paranoia. For her performance, Lingnau and the ensemble cast received a Special Jury Prize at the 2025 Hessian Film Awards.