Ingrid Becker-Ross-Troeller was born in Berlin in 1940 and grew up as a refugee child in Wendland (Lower Saxony) after the war. She lives in Hamburg since 1959, where she studied literature, German language and literature, and Romance languages. In 1969, she passed the second state examination for higher teaching qualifications; worked for a year as a high school teacher in Hamburg and began a dissertation in Comparative Education, which she completed in 1976 at the University of Bremen.
She then worked part-time as a teacher in Hamburg and became involved in the journalistic work of Gordian Troeller and Marie-Claude Deffarge.
She met this Hamburg-based journalist couple, who worked mainly for the German magazine Stern in the 1960s, towards the end of her first degree in 1966. She was impressed by their way of life and work, their political views and analyses. The initial friendship soon developed into a closer personal and working relationship.
While she was on a six-month research trip in Latin America in 1974, the journalist couple separated. Marie-Claude Deffarge went to Paris to establish herself as a journalist in France.
During this time, Troeller, together with French economist and cultural critic François Partant, shot the first three films in the series Im Namen des Fortschritts (In the Name of Progress) in Africa on behalf of the ARD broadcaster Radio Bremen (RB). However, the close collaboration between Troeller, Deffarge, and Becker-Ross continued.
From 1975 to the 1990s, 70 documentaries were produced for Radio Bremen in three series — In the Name of Progress, Women of the World, Children of the World .
When Marie-Claude Deffarge died in Paris in 1984, Ingrid Becker-Ross accompanied Gordian Troeller on his film trips more and more frequently. From 1986 to 1989, she took a leave of absence from the school to work exclusively on the series Children of the World.
Ingrid Becker-Ross and Gordian Troeller married in 1987.
Gordian Troeller died in 2003.
Ingrid Becker-Ross continued to teach at the Heinrich Heine Gymnasium in Hamburg until the 2005 school year.
Since then, she has devots her work to archiving, preserving, and disseminating the entire journalistic oeuvre, including through this website.