Bieke Depoorter was born in 1986 in Kortrijk, Belgium. She received a Master’s Degree in Photography at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent in 2009. Her early colour photography work is the result of a unique approach: she captures the privacy of people whom she meets by chance and she gets to invite her into their homes. She captures indescribable, fragile and intense moments. For the Ou Menya series, the young artist travelled for three months in Russia, to remote villages, guided by the Trans-Siberian Railway. This work won her several awards, including the Magnum Expression Award in 2009. For a similar long-term project entitled I am about to call it a day, the photographer went to the United States. With Sète#15, in photographs taken during an artistic residency for the festival Images Singulières, it's for the first time that Depoorter explores the thin line between fiction and documentary. She presents a nocturnal vision of the city, with a filmic dream-like atmosphere. Her photographs convey the muted pulsations of a sleeping city.

Depoorter finalized her first shortmovie Dvalemodus in 2017, which she directed together with musician Mattias De Craene. The film talks about the everlasting darkness in a small village in the Northern Norway.

Depoorter has received the 2017 Levallois Photographic Prize for her work in Egypt published in Mumkin – Est-ce possible ? Since the beginning of the uprising in 2011 in Egypt, she tried to find trust in a country where mistrust predominates.

She joined Magnum Photos agency as a full member in 2016.