Paula Winkler was born in East Berlin in 1980. She studied at the FH Bielefeld with Katharina Bosse and has been a member of the OSTKREUZ agency since 2022.

Paula Winkler loves meeting people, which is why she specialises in portrait photography. As part of her free long-term projects, she enters into ambivalent situations with strangers she meets and photographs in hotels or the countryside. For her work "Exceptional Encounters", she went to various sex platforms where she contacted men under the pseudonym Renate Rost to photograph them in hotel rooms. The photo session with them replaced the sexual encounter the men were originally looking for on the platform. The work has been exhibited internationally and nationally several times, most recently in the exhibition "In the Cut - the male body in feminist art".

She proves that she can also photograph clothed people in her commissioned works. She regularly photographs for renowned publishers, companies and magazines such as SZ Magazin, Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, Capital, Barbara Magazin, Hanser Verlag and Rewe. With her poodle lady Susi, she lives and works in Berlin and sometimes elsewhere.