German motion-picture director, actress, producer, and photographer who is best known for her documentary films of the 1930s dramatizing the power and pageantry of the Nazi (Nazi Party) movement.

Riefenstahl studied painting and ballet in Berlin, and from 1923 to 1926 she appeared in dance programs throughout Europe. She began her motion-picture career as an actress in “mountain films”—a type of German film in which nature, especially the mountain landscape, plays an important role—and she eventually became a director in the genre. In 1931 she formed a company, Leni Riefenstahl-Produktion, and the following year wrote, directed, produced, and starred in Das blaue Licht (1932; The Blue Light).

Because her films had aided the Nazi cause, Riefenstahl was detained by Allied forces after World War II, and, although she was officially cleared of complicity in Nazi war crimes, she was blacklisted. In 1954 she completed Tiefland (“Lowland”), the production of which had been interrupted by the war, but her career as a filmmaker was effectively over. Die Nuba (The Last of the Nuba), a book of her African photographs, was published in 1973. Much of her later life was devoted to photography, and Korallengärten (1978; Coral Gardens) and Wunder unter Wasser (1990; Wonders Under Water) are collections of her underwater photographs; a documentary on marine life, Impressionen unter Wasser (Impressions Under Water), was released in 2002. At age 91, Riefenstahl was interviewed for director Ray Müller's highly praised documentary Die Macht der Bilder: Leni Riefenstahl (1993; The Power of the Image: Leni Riefenstahl, or The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl), in which she reveals herself as an undeniably brilliant woman with profoundly mixed feelings about her association with the Third Reich. Memoiren (1987; A Memoir, or The Sieve of Time: The Memoirs of Leni Riefenstahl) is her autobiography.