Stina Werenfels Biography: Family, Education, Height, Net Worth, Nationality, Partner, Age

Stina Werenfels is a film director, screenwriter, producer, and author known for creating morally charged films that reveal hidden fractures in family, society, and history.

Born in Basel to a Jewish-Swiss family, she spent her early childhood between the United States, Greece, and Spain before leaving a pharmacy degree at ETH Zurich to study at NYU’s Tisch School with Spike Lee and Arthur Penn.

Profile

• Full Name: Stina Werenfels
• Stage Name: Stina Werenfels
• Born: 1964
• Age: 61 years old
• Birthplace: Basel, Switzerland
• Nationality: Swiss
• Occupation: Film Director, Screenwriter, Producer, Author
• Height: Unknown
• Parents: Mr. and Mrs. Werenfels
• Siblings: Unknown
• Spouse: None
• Children: None
• Relationship: Not married
• Net Worth: $1.5 million

Early Life and Education

Stina Werenfels was born in 1964 in Basel, Switzerland, to a Jewish family whose displacement influenced her creative outlook. She spent her childhood in the United States, Greece, and Spain, developing a strong sensitivity to cultural and linguistic diversity.

After returning to Switzerland, she earned a pharmacy degree from ETH Zurich before switching to film. She studied at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she was mentored by Spike Lee, Arthur Penn, and acting coach Marketa Kimbrell. Though of Swiss-Jewish descent, she keeps her religious beliefs private.

Career

Stina Werenfels entered filmmaking through documentary fragments, directing The Making of a Jew within the 1999 omnibus ID Swiss, an early meditation on identity and assimilation.

Her feature debut Nachbeben (2006) dissected a Zurich family’s collapse after a father’s suicide, earning a Swiss Film Awards Special Jury Prize and nominations for Best Feature and Screenplay.

Nearly a decade later she adapted Lukas Bärfuss’s controversial play into Dora oder die sexuellen Neurosen unserer Eltern (2015), a Berlinale Panorama selection that followed a young woman with disabilities claiming sexual agency; critics lauded its refusal of easy sentiment. Alongside fiction, Werenfels co-produced Samir’s Baghdad in

My Shadow (2019) and developed a pipeline of documentaries: Frisch, née Krakowska, tracing her own Jewish lineage; Hirschfeld, profiling the exiled theater director; and Each of Us, co-directing a historical drama on Ravensbrück women. In 2017 she co-founded Zurich’s Kosmos—a three-screen cinema, book salon, and forum—that swiftly became a hub for Swiss arthouse and debate.

She guest-lectures at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), shaping screenwriting pedagogy with the same precision she brings to editing.

Stina Werenfels advances with Aletsch – The Glacier, a narrative feature merging ecological collapse and personal memory, and the newly announced La dernière bande, a Beckett-inspired chamber piece.

Her influence radiates through Kosmos retrospectives of Swiss women directors and ZHdK alumni debuts. Whether exposing parental failure, sexual autonomy, or historical silence, Werenfels wields cinema as a scalpel—quiet, unflinching, and profoundly human.

Social Media

• Stina Werenfels has no verified social media account.

Personal Life

Stina Werenfels deliberately maintains a clear boundary between her private and public lives, carefully shielding her romantic and family details from public scrutiny; throughout interviews, festival profiles, and media appearances, no mention or indication of a partner or children ever emerges, underscoring her commitment to privacy in these deeply personal areas.

Filmography

• ID Swiss – The Making of a Jew (1999)
• Nachbeben (2006)
• Dora oder die sexuellen Neurosen unserer Eltern (2015)

Net Worth

Stina Werenfels holds an estimated net worth of $1.5 million, built from directing and screenwriting fees on Swiss-German co-productions, plus producing credits and cultural grants from Pro Helvetia and the Swiss Film Fund.