Theo Solnik was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil in 1981. He is a film director, cinematographer, film editor, photographer, actor and composer. At the age of 15 he started to work as a freelance press photographer for several weekly magazines in Brazil.

He made his artistic debut as an actor and pianist in 1998 in Cacilda!, a play by Teatro Oficina, written and directed by the acclaimed Brazilian theater director José Celso Martinez Correa. At the age of 17, he moved to Norway, where he shot and directed his first short film Gangster Blues, studied Philosophy and Sociology at the University of Oslo and showed his first solo photography exhibitions. After finishing his studies, he moved to Berlin to study film directing at the prestigious German Film and Television Academy Berlin (dffb). 

His first feature-length movie Anna Pavlova lives in Berlin, shot during his second year of film studies, received several awards, including the Award for Young Film Art from the German National Gallery and the German Film Academy, presented by Bruno Ganz and Iris Berben. As part of the prize, the movie was shown daily over a period of 4 months in an exclusive room in the museum Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, Germany.

Anna Pavlova lives in Berlin won the Promotional Prize of the City of Duisburg during the Duisburg Film Week, Best Feature at the Boddinale Film Festival 2013, Best Cinematography at the Achtung Berlin Festival 2012, the Special Prize of the Jury at the CineramaBC International Film Festival and the Helene-Schwarz Preis 2012. The movie has been screened in several international festivals and art exhibitions, including the Rauma Biennale Balticum 2012 and the European Media Art Festival Osnabrück 2012. 

Besides being the Director of Photography of many documentaries that won international awards, Theo Solnik was also the DP, Director and editor of shorter documentary projects for companies like Google, Huawei, Pfizer, GiLead, Asahi-Kasei and World Expo.

While working on motion picture projects, Theo Solnik has continued to work as a still photographer, having portrayed notable personalities and heads of state. In 2017 he was the official photographer of the State Visit to Portugal of King Willem-Alexander and Queen Máxima of the Netherlands. In March 2022, he documented the visit of Henri, Grand Duke of Luxembourg, to Lisbon. He also was the DP of a short documentary about Giorgio Parisi, the 2022 Nobel Prize Winner for Physics, for SVT, the Swedish National Public broadcast corporation.

He is fluent in Portuguese, English, German, Spanish, French and Norwegian.