Biography

Ueli Meier was born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1958. After an apprenticeship as a photographer (1977–80), he has worked as an independent photojournalist and director, cinematographer and screenwriter of documentary films since 1980.

His photo essays and portraits have been published in magazines such as Das Magazin, Schweizer Familie and NZZ Folio, amongst others. In 1997, he received the Swiss Design Award from the Federal Office of Culture. In 2024, the photo book "Ueli Meier – In einer anderen Schweiz. Fotoreportagen 1980–2000" was published by Scheidegger & Spiess.

Whilst still training as a photographer, he directed his first internationally recognised short documentary film THE WEEKEND DRIVE (1980), a portrait of a young commercial clerk who runs an imaginary music radio station all on his own in his high-rise apartment at Switzerland’s very first shopping centre in Spreitenbach.

His first feature-length documentary for the big screen is TIBI AND HIS MOTHERS (2012), the story of a Tibetan refugee child who, in 1963 at the age of seven, was brought from a children's home in Dharamsala by a private aid organization to a foster mother in Switzerland without his mother's knowledge.

His most recent cinema documentary to date is ICH HABE IN MOLL GETRÄUMT (2021), a stirring search for traces of the lost Swiss poet Walter Rufer.