Andreas Höfer was born on March 10, 1964, in the city of Potsdam-Babelsberg, where he began studying cinematography at the Konrad Wolf Academy of Film and Television, graduating with a diploma. At the end of the 1980s, while he was still at university, his first (short) films were screened at Festivals. All of them were made together with fellow student Andreas Dresen and, like "Zug in die Ferne," made it into the program of the Oberhausen Short Film Festival or the Berlinale.

The student projects developed into an extremely fruitful collaboration with Dresen over the next years and decades. Höfer was responsible for the camera on their joint West-German debut "Stilles Land", on Dresen's TV productions of the 1990s and on classics of more recent German cinema such as "Nachtgestalten" ("Night Shapes", 1999), "Herr Wichmann von der CDU" ("Vote For Henryk!", 2003) or "Sommer vorm Balkon" ("Summer in Berlin", 2005). In all of those films, Höfer's trademark is the hand-held camera and a very naturalistic visual style. 

With Volker Schlöndorff he shot "Die Stille nach dem Schuss" ("The Legends of Rita") in 1999/2000 and filmed his episode for "Ten Minutes Older - The Cello" (GB/DE 2002) as well as the documentary "Ein Produzent hat Seele oder er hat keine". He proved his versatility with the youth film "Fickende Fische" ("Do Fish Do It?", 2002) and the Hape Kerkeling comedy "Samba in Mettmann" (2004). Another collaboration with Schlöndorff on "Strajk - Die Heldin von Danzig" earned Höfer the Bavarian Film Award for Best Cinematography in January 2007. His camera work on that film, which is always close to the action, brought the workers' struggle of Poland's Solidarnosc to life in a very authentic way.

In the following years, Höfer shot the film-industry comedy "Whisky mit Wodka" ("Whisky with Vodka", 2009) with Dresen, as well as "Herr Wichmann aus der dritten Reihe" ("Henryk from the Back Row", 2012), a follow-up to the 2003 political documentary. In between Andreas Höfer was awarded the German Camera Award in the TV-film/docudrama category for the TV production "Empathie" (2009), directed by Marc-Andreas Bochert. For Bochert, he also shot "Inklusion - gemeinsam anders" (2011, TV), "Dyslexie" (2014, TV) and "Krüger aus Almanya" (2015, TV). 

Andreas Höfer's next collaboration with Andreas Dresen, the biopic "Gundermann" about the singer-songwriter of the same name, was shot, like so many of their collaborations, on original locations, in this case in the Lusatian coalfields; for his work on this film, Höfer was nominated for the 2019 German Film Award.

Höfer is connected to his alma mater, the Babelsberg Konrad Wolf Film University, as a recurring lecturer on photography, a task he also pursues in exhibitions and publications.