Jonas Nay was born in Lübeck on September 20 1990. Developing an early interest in acting, he took part in an audition in 2004 and was cast in the TV series "4 gegen Z". Following more TV appearances, he was offered the lead role in the made-for-TV drama "Homevideo. The film about a teenager who is blackmailed and mobbed by his classmates won numerous awards, while Nay's performance garnered him the Förderpreis des deutschen Fernsehpreises and the Günter-Strack-Fernsehpeis.

After turns in the TV crime dramas "Die Ballade von Cenk und Valerie" and "Todesschütze", he made his debut in a theatrical release with David Dietl's "König von Deutschland" ("King of Germany"). In 2013 he played a 16-year old murder supect in "Nichts mehr wie vorher" (2013, TV).

He then starred in Rolf Roring's "Dear Courtney" (2014) as a boy who wants to impress the girl of his dreams with a self-composed song, which eventually ends up being stolen by US grunge rockers Nirvana. Nay got rave reviews and won the award for Best Newcomer at the 2014 Bavarian film Award for his performance as the son of a mentally ill man in "Hirngespinster" ("Flights of Fancy"), and he was one of the leads in the acclaimed drama "Wir sind jung. Wir sind stark" ("We are Young. We are Strong."), which opened the 2014 Hofer Filmtage and was released theatrically in January 2015. He was nominated for the German Film Award for his performance in this film.  

Also in 2015, Nay received a nomination for the Bavarian Television Award for his role as a convinced communist in the historical series "Tannbach - Schicksal eines Dorfes," and a nomination for the C21 Media International Drama Award for his portrayal of a GDR border guard in the internationally successful series "Deutschland 83. For both of these roles he was awarded the German Television Award in 2016; he also received a Grimme Award and the acting award at the Festival de Télévision de Monte-Carlo for "Deutschland 83". Nay appeared in the sequels "Deutschland 86" (2018) and "Deutschland 89" (2020), too.

He had further leading roles in the highly acclaimed Siegfried Lenz adaptation "Schweigeminute" (2016, TV), as the son in Lars Jessen's father-son comedy "Vadder, Kutter, Sohn" (2017, TV), as a German expatriate to America in Uli Edel's postwar story "Der Club der singenden Metzger" (2019), as a sadistic SS man in "Persischstunden" ("Persian Lessons", 2020) and in the relationship drama "Du Sie Er & Wir" (2021).

In 2022, Jonas Nay had a leading role in Michael Herbig's "Tausend Zeilen"; the film was based on the case of Claas Relotius, a star reporter for the news magazine Der Spiegel who was exposed as a forger.