Christoph Maria Schlingensief (24 October 1960 – 21 August 2010) was a German theatre director, performance artist, and filmmaker. Starting as an independent underground filmmaker, Schlingensief later staged productions for theatres and festivals, often accompanied by public controversies. In the final years before his death, he staged Wagner's Parsifal at the Bayreuth Festival and worked at several opera houses, establishing himself as a Regietheater artist.

Schlingensief was born on 24 October 1960 in Oberhausen. His father was a pharmacist and his mother a pediatric nurse. As a child, he worked as an altar server and already made short films with a hand-held camera.

Having passed his Abitur exams, he twice failed to gain admission to the University of Television and Film Munich. From 1981 he studied German language and literature, philosophy and art history at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, but also dabbled as a musician and finally dropped out in 1983 to work as an assistant to the experimental filmmaker Werner Nekes. After working as a teacher at Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach am Main and Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, he became a production manager on Hans W. Geißendörfer's TV series Lindenstraße.

Already as a young man Schlingensief had organized art events in the cellar of his parents' house, and local artists such as Helge Schneider or Theo Jörgensmann performed in his early short films. He considered himself a 'provocatively thoughtful' artist. He created numerous controversial and provocative theatre pieces as well as films, his former mentor being filmmaker and media artist Werner Nekes.

Already Schlingensief's debut feature film, the surreal, absurd experimental Tunguska – Die Kisten sind da! ("Tunguska – The Crates Are Delivered!", 1984) was well received by critics. Growing up in the shadow of the New German Cinema, Schlingensief was deeply influenced by the likes of Rainer Werner Fassbinder—many members of whose stock company of actors such as Udo Kier, Margit Carstensen, Irm Hermann or Volker Spengler became regulars in Schlingensief's films—or Alexander Kluge, with whom he collaborated on numerous occasions. To said period of film, Schlingensief delivered both a heartfelt homage as well as the final coup de grâce with The 120 Days of Bottrop [de]—starring Helmut Berger, playing an inept director's effort to remake Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975)—in much the same way he dealt with German avant-garde cinema 15 years earlier with his first feature film Tunguska – The Crates Are Delivered starring Alfred Edel [de]. Drawing parallels to the work of British filmmaker Derek Jarman, Egomania – Island without Hope (1986) starred Kier and Tilda Swinton. Other influences include Luis Buñuel, Werner Schroeter or Herbert Achternbusch—and Schlingensief's filmic works have been compared to just as wide a range of filmmakers, from Jean-Luc Godard to Russ Meyer.

With his "Germany Trilogy", consisting of 100 Years of Adolf Hitler – The Last Hour in the Führerbunker, The German Chainsaw Massacre – The First Hour of the Reunification and Terror 2000 – Germany out of Control, Schlingensief came to prominence. Since then he shaped the cultural and political discourse in Germany for more than two decades and established himself as one of the country's most important and versatile artists. The "Germany Trilogy" deals with three turning points in 20th-century German history: the first movie Hundert Jahre Adolf Hitler ("A Hundred Years of Adolf Hitler", 1989) covers the last hours of Adolf Hitler, the second The German Chainsaw Massacre (1990), depicts the German reunification of 1990 and shows a group of East Germans who cross the border to visit West Germany and get slaughtered by a psychopathic West German family with chainsaws, and the third Terror 2000 (1992) focuses on xenophobic violence after the reunification process.

One of Schlingensief's central tactics was to call politicians' bluff in an attempt to reveal the inanities of their "responsible" discourse, a tactic he called "playing something through to its end". This strategy was most notable in his work, the multimedia installation Bitte liebt Österreich or Please Love Austria (alternately named Foreigners out! Schlingensiefs Container). Produced in June 2000 at the time of the FPÖ and ÖVP coalition in Austria, this reality television-like installation was a direct public answer to the party slogan "Ausländer Raus" (Foreigners Out). It consisted in real life asylum seekers that instead of being voted out of the show were to be voted out of the country. Please Love Austria attracted international support, a media frenzy and provoked countless debates about art practice. A documentary film based on the performance has been made by Paul Poet and released in 2002.

In 2009, he joined the jury of the Berlin International Film Festival with Tilda Swinton as jury president.