Barbara Dombrowski was born in Stuttgart. Until the early 1990s, she studied visual communication at the University of Applied Sciences in Dortmund. Afterward, she lived in Paris until 1996, supported by an art scholarship from the German-French Youth Office. Since returning to Germany, she has lived in Hamburg and is a member of the laif agency in Cologne.
Giving climate change a face: For over 10 years, Dombrowski has worked on the global photo-art project "Tropic Ice_Dialog between Places affected by Climate Change." For this project, she visited indigenous peoples on five continents and combined the resulting images in art installations to demonstrate that everything is interconnected. Today, she often works on extensive thematic projects in collaboration with scientists, universities, and NGOs, such as CAU Kiel or the University of Hamburg for the book project "Everyday Worlds of Climate Change."
She has received numerous awards and honors for her work, regularly presents it in national and international exhibitions, and gives lectures on it. In 2012 and 2017, she was awarded a grant from VG Bild Kunst to realize the "Tropic Ice" project, and in 2021, she received a scholarship for her current project "Quo Vadis, Europe? Human-Nature Relationship in the Anthropocene." Since the end of 2022, she has been an appointed member of the German Society for Photography (DGPh).