Emma Nova was born in Berlin in 1995 and began her acting career as a teenager. She first attracted significant attention through Stephan Lacant’s film Toter Winkel (2016), which won an International Emmy Award in 2019, and through the film adaptation of the novel Der Trafikant, which was adapted for the big screen.

In 2019, she was selected as a “European Shooting Star” by European Film Promotion.

Her acting breakthrough came with Julia C. Kaiser’s film Nichts, was uns passiert (2022), for which she received both the Grimme Prize and the German Film Critics’ Award for Best Actress in 2024. She took on the lead role in the feature film Vera (directed by Chiara Fleischhacker), which won the First Steps Award in 2024 and for which she was nominated for the German Film Award for Best Actress in 2025, the most prestigious accolade in the German film industry.

Her career spans numerous roles in German film and television productions over the last two decades, including Wild Republic, the ZDFneo series Loving Her and Disko 76 (RTL+). Her most recent work includes Hannu Salonen’s Vienna Game (Disney+) and the ZDFneo series Moresnet, as well as David Wnendt’s feature film Athos, which is due to be released in cinemas in 2027.