Brenda Strohmeier was born in Munich and spent her childhood in Hesse and in the Saarland. After graduating from high school, she moved to Berlin where she studied journalism, economics and political science. During that time she also jobbed as a radio reporter and lived in England for a year. Before finally opting for a career in journalism in 2000, she signed up for a stretch of eighteen months as an assistant to Thomas M. Stein, the music manager well-known from television. She then worked for Radio Eins in Potsdam, tried her luck as a financial correspondent in New York, was trained at the Berliner Zeitung, continued at Spiegel Online in Hamburg before in 2006, the year of the football world cup, she found a permanent post at Die Welt in Berlin. There she regularly writes – among many other things – a column on new trends in the style section – covering subjects from padded bras to urban birding. From 2010 to 2014 she also completed a PhD at the University of Darmstadt, which dealt with the sociological questions of how one becomes a true Berliner. She integrated her findings into the book Der Berlin-Code.