Krzysztof Kieslowski was born June 27, 1941, in Warsaw, Poland. He lived in several small towns, moving to wherever his engineer father, a tuberculosis patient, could find treatment. At sixteen, he briefly attended a firemen's training school, but dropped out after three months. Without any career goals, he then entered the College for Theatre Technicians in Warsaw in 1957 because it was run by a relative. He decided to become a theatre director, but at the time there was no specific training program for directors, so he chose to study film as an intermediate step.

Leaving college and working as a theatrical tailor, Kieslowski applied to the Lódz Film School, the famed Polish film school that also produced Roman Polanski and Andrzej Wajda. He was accepted in his third attempt. Kieslowski escaped from the compulsory military service by going on a drastic diet to make himself unfit for the service. He attended from 1964 to 1968, during a period in which the government allowed a relatively high degree of artistic freedom at the school. Kieslowski quickly lost his interest in theatre and made his first documentary films, mostly about city dwellers, workers, and soldiers.

Shortly after begin filming non-documentary features, Kieslowski was considered part of a loose movement with other Polish directors of the time, including Janusz Kijowski, Andrzej Wajda, and Agnieszka Holland, called the Cinema of Moral Anxiety.

Starting with No End (1984), Kieslowski's career was closely associated with two regular collaborators: composer Zbigniew Preisner and screenwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz, who was a co-writer of The Decalogue (1988), a series of ten short films set in a Warsaw tower block, each nominally based on one of the Ten Commandments. They were created for Polish television with funding from West Germany; it is now one of the most critically acclaimed film cycles of all time.

Kieslowski's last four films were foreign co-productions, made mainly with money from France and in particular producer Marin Karmitz. Poland appeared in these films mostly through the eyes of European outsiders.

The first of these was La double vie de Véronique (The Double Life of Véronique) (1990), starring Irène Jacob. The relative commercial success of this film allowed Kieslowski the opportunity to raise the funding for his ambitious final films, the trilogy Three Colors (Blue, White, Red), which explores the virtues symbolized by the French flag. Three Colors is his most acclaimed work next to The Decalogue and his first international commercial successes. The three films together garnered a host of prestigious international awards, including the Golden Lion for Best Film and Silver Lion for Best Director at the Venice Film Festival, and the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin Film Festival, in addition to winning three Academy Award nominations. The Trilogy is generally regarded as a major achievement in modern cinema.

Krzysztof Kieslowski died aged 54 on March 13, 1996, during open-heart surgery following a heart attack, and was interred in Powazki Cemetery in Warsaw. His grave is located within the prestigious plot 23 and has a sculpture of the thumb and forefingers of two hands forming an oblong space — the classic view as if through a movie camera.