Michael Glawogger was born in 1959 in Graz, Austria. After he finished his studies at the San Francisco Art Institute and at Vienna's Filmakademie, Glawogger started to work as a director, writer, and cinematographer.

Glawogger applied himself to fictional as well as documentary projects. His early works include the feature films "Krieg in Wien" (1989) and "Ameisenstraße" ("Ant Street", 1995, winner of the Vienna Film Award) and the multiple award-winning documentary "Megacities" that portrays residents of megacities like Bombay, New York, Mexico City, and Moscow in twelve episodes. After "Frankreich, wir kommen" ("France, Here We Come!", 1999), Glawogger finished the essay film "Zur Lage" ("State of the Nation", 2002) together with fellow filmmakers Barbara Albert, Michael Sturminger, and Ulrich Seidl.

With "Workingman's Death" (2002 to 2005), Glawogger realized a global long-term documentary that focuses on the desperate situation of industrial workers who do the most taxing work but have more and more fallen from the public eye. In his feature film "Slumming" that premiered in the competition of the 2006 Berlinale, Glawogger also deals with social conditions and gives a black-humoured outline of the current wealth gap.

After the psychedelic comedy "Contact High", which takes up characters and motives of his earlier film "Nacktschnecken", Glawogger presented his drama "Das Vaterspiel" ("Kill Daddy Good Night"), that is based on Josef Haslinger's novel. Then he made the documentary "Whores' Glory - Ein Triptychon zur Prostitution" (2011), in which he portrays the everyday life and struggle of prostitutes in Bangok, Mexico and Bangladesh. "Whores' Glory" was awarded the Special Prize of the Jury at the 2011 Venice IFF and won the categories Best Documentary and Best Camera at the 2012 Viennale. In 2011, Glawogger was one of sixty filmmakers who contributed a one-minute clip to the compilation film "60 Seconds of Solitude in Year Zero". He also shot a segment on the Russian National Library for "Kathedralen der Kultur" ("Cathedrals of Culture", 2014), a 3D compilation film on famous and remarkable buildings from all over the world.

In late 2013, Glawogger and his small crew set out for an international journey, during which he planned to shoot his next – unscripted – feature "Untitled". During the trip, Michael Glawogger died on the eve of April 23rd 2014 in Liberia from complications caused by a Malaria infection.

His long-term editor Monika Willi eventually took care of the orphan footage that Glawogger had shot on a four-and-a-half month journey through the Balkan, Italy and Africa and turned it into a film: "Untitled" premiered in the Panorama section of the Berlin IFF in February 2017.