Monika Jacobs, born in 1946, first completed an apprenticeship as a dressmaker and then studied at art academies in Vienna and Berlin. As a costume designer, she first worked for the theatre and from 1977 also for film and television productions. She was responsible for the costume design of such diverse films as Rainer Werner Fassbinder's "Querelle" (1982), Wim Wenders' "Der Himmel über Berlin" ("Wings of Desire", 1987) or Otto Waalkes' and Xaver Schwarzenberger's "Otto - Der Neue Film" (1987).   

In 1993 she worked for the first time with Tom Tykwer on "Die tödliche Maria" ("Deadly Maria"), for whom she also designed the costumes for "Lola rennt" ("Run Lola Run", 1998), "Der Krieger und die Kaiserin" ("The Princess and the Warrior", 2000) and "Heaven" (2002) in the following years. Other important productions Monika Jacobs worked on included the TV drama "Die Luftbrücke - Nur der Himmel war frei" (2005) and the international co-production "Ein russischer Sommer" ("The Last Station", 2009) starring Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer. She was nominated for the German Film Award in 2011 for her costume designs for the historical football film "Der ganz große Traum" ("Lessons of a Dream").  

In 2012, Jacobs designed the costumes for Bille August's international bestseller adaptation "Night Train to Lisbon", starring Jeremy Irons, Martina Gedeck, Bruno Ganz and August Diehl. This was followed by a number of TV productions, among them Max Färberböck's comedy "Mein Vater, seine Freunde und das ganz schnelle Geld" (2013), Roland Suso Richter's TV biopic "Grzimek" (2015) about the famous German zoologist of the same name, and in 2017 the German-American TV series "Deutschland 86", which deals with the conflict between East and West Germany, the political relationship between the Soviet Union and the USA shortly before the end of the Cold War, and the fight against apartheid in South Africa, among other things.   

The TV multi-parter "Der Club der singenden Metzger" ("The Master Butcher"), based on the screenplay by Doris Dörrie and Ruth Stadler and directed by Uli Edel, premiered at the Munich Film Festival in July 2019 and was broadcast on TV later that same year.