Hannah Höch, born Joanne Höch in Gotha, studied art in Berlin and worked as a pattern designer and writer on women's handicrafts from 1916–1926. Her affair and artistic partnership with Raoul Hausmann, a Viennese artist, lasted from 1915 to 1922. Through Hausmann, she became part of the Berlin Club Dada, the German group of Dadaists, an artistic movement dating from about 1916 and also involved, after the first World War, with political radicalism. Höch herself expressed herself less politically than many of the others in the group. From 1926–1929 she lived and worked in Holland. She lived for some years in a lesbian relationship with Dutch poet Til Brugman.

Höch spent the years of the Third Reich in Germany, trying to remain quiet and in the background. She married the much-younger businessman and pianist Kurt Matthies in 1938, divorcing in 1944.

Though her work was not acclaimed after the war as it had been before the rise of the Third Reich, she continued to produce her photomontages and to exhibit them internationally until her death.

In her work, she used photos, other paper objects, pieces of machines and various other objects to produce images, usually quite large.