Heba Khaled was born in Damascus in 1986 and studied Arabic Literature at Damascus University. She worked as a radio commentator and as a freelance fixer for CNN, Al Arabiya and Reuters in Damascus and Beirut between 2011 and 2013. In 2014, she started collecting footage for her first short-film People of the Wasteland. The same year, she moved to Berlin where she assisted the filmmaker Talal Derki in the direction of his film Of Fathers and Sons, which has won the Sundance Film Festival’s World Cinema Grand Jury Prize in 2018.