Jens Meurer was born in Nuremberg in 1963 and grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa, from the age of 12. He gained his first experience in the media business as a sports reporter and editor at the West Rand Times in Krugersdorp, a town not far from Johannesburg. After studying at Balliol College in Oxford, England, the Institut d'études politiques de Paris (Sciences Po for short) and Columbia University in New York City, he began making his first documentary films in the early 1990s. In 1992, he founded his production company Egoli Films.    

He made a TV documentary about the disintegration of the Soviet Union ("The Last Year of the Soviet Union," 1992) and was awarded the European Film Prize in 1995 for his short documentary "Viva Stalin." He made further films about the overcoming of apartheid in South Africa ("Egoli - Ein Heimatfilm aus Südafrika", 1996), the history of the Jecken ("Jeckes - Die entfernten Verwandten", 1997) and the Black Panther movement in the USA ("Public Enemy", 1999). As a producer and co-producer, he worked on films by other directors, such as "Der Glanz von Berlin" (2001) by Judith Keil and Antje Kruska.   

In 2001, Egoli Films merged with Judy Tossell's Tossell Pictures to form Egoli Tossell Film. Meurer and Tossell had already met in 1984 while studying at Balliol College. Over the next few years, they produced numerous films, some of them award-winning. In addition to sole productions such as "Grüße aus Dachau" ("From Dachau With Love", 2003), "Dancing With Myself" (2005) and Kai Wessel's "Hilde" (2009), Egoli Tossell Film was also involved in international co-productions such as Aleksandr Sokurov's "Russian Ark" (RU/DE 2002), Paul Verhoeven's "Black Book" (NL/GB/DE/BE 2006) and Michael Hoffman's "The Last Station" (DE/GB/RU) with Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer.   

An economic disruption occurred after Olivier Assayas' French-German production "Carlos" (2010), a lavish epic about the life of the notorious terrorist Carlos: a foreign production partner unexpectedly dropped out, and although the film was critically acclaimed, it ultimately failed to bring in any money. This resulted in liquidity problems and in January 2011 Egoli Tossell Film had to file for bankruptcy. The following year in 2012, the company was reorganized via insolvency plan proceedings.   

In the following years, Meurer was involved as a producer or executive producer in films such as Ron Howard's Formula 1 drama "Rush - Alles für den Sieg" (US/GB/DE 2013), Peter Chelsom's self-discovery story "Hectors Reise oder die Suche nach dem Glück" ("Hector and the Search for Happiness", DE/CN 2014), the adventure film "Big Game" (FI/GB/DE 2015) and Atom Egoyan's war crimes drama "Remember" (CN/DE 2015). 2016 saw the renaming of Egoli Tossell Film to Egoli Tossell Pictures.    

In 2013, Meurer had already started working on another documentary of his own (with his newly founded UG Instant Film): in "An Impossible Project" (AT/DE), kickstarter-financed and shot on 35mm, he follows the founder of a company specializing in endangered analog products such as vinyl records and paper goods, who now wants to save the Polaroid photo format. After six years of work, the film premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival in January 2020. Due to the Covid pandemic, the regular theatrical release was not until two years later, in January 2022, by which time Meurer had already completed his next film, "Seaside Special," an affectionate and humorous portrait of Britain, for which he spent a year observing the last traditional end-of-the-pier show in the remote English seaside resort of Cromer. The world premiere took place in October 2021 at the Hof Film Festival.