Ingrid Becker-Ross-Troeller was born in Berlin in 1940. Since the ant of the war 1945 she grew up as a refugee child in Wendland (Lower Saxony) . Since 1959 she lived in Hamburg , where she studied literature and modern languages. In 1969, she passed the second state examination for higher teaching qualifications;
She worked for a year as a secondary school teacher at a school in Hamburg and began a dissertation (PHD) in comparative education, which she completed in 1976 at the University of Bremen.
She then worked part-time as a teacher at secondary schools 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 professional relationship.
While on a six-month research trip to 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 documentaries in the series Im Namen des Fortschritts (In the Name of Progress) in Africa on behalf of the first TV channel, ARD in Germany. However, the collaboration between Troeller Deffarge and Becker-Ross continued.
From 1974 to the 1990s, they produced 70 documentaries in three series — Im Namen des Fortschritts (In the Name of Progress), Frauen der Welt (Women of the World), Kinder der Welt (Children of the World).
1984 Marie-Claude Deffarge died in Paris. The collaboration between Ingrid Becker-Ross and Gordian Troeller became more intense. She. accompanied Troeller on film shoots more and more frequently. She took a leave of absence from school from 1986 to 1989 in order to work on the series Children of the World. Her project to critically portray the upbringing of children and the conditions under which education and learning take place in Germany in three episodes of the series was never realised.
Ingrid Becker-Ross and Gordian Troeller married in 1987.
Gordian Troeller died in March 2003.
Ingrid Becker-Ross continued to teach at the Heinrich Heine Gymnasium in Hamburg until the 2005 school year.
Since then, she has devoted her work to archiving, preserving and disseminating the entire journalistic oeuvre, including through this website.