David Schidlowsky, lecturer and researcher, was born in Detmold, Germany. He is the son of the Chilean-Israeli composer Leon Schidlowsky and the piano teacher Susanne. He lived in Chile until 1968, where he attended the Jewish School (Instituto Hebreo). In 1969 he emigrated with his family to Israel. He lived in Kibbutz Ma´abarot until 1976. Afterwards he lived in Tel Aviv, where he worked in a photo laboratory, in a publishing house and a bookstore. By taking evening classes, he was able to complete his high school education in 1979. The same year he went to Hamburg. Since 1980 he has been living in Berlin, Germany.

In 1983 he began a Master degree in Latin-American and Theatre Studies at the Free University of Berlin, in the course of which he spent a semester in Porto Alegre in Brazil. In 1990 he completed his MA degree with a monograph on the novel The strange Nation of Rafael Mendes by the Jewish-Brazilian author Moacyr Scliar. This research was published in 1996 at the Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Berlin.

Between 1987 and 1994 he produced several film documentaries, among them one on the Brazilian Author João Antônio and his sojourn in the city of Berlin, but also about musical events held in Berlin.

Between 1994 and 1999 he undertook several journeys to Chile to pursue research on the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. In 1999 he completed his biography on the first forty years of the poet's life, and defended his thesis in order to obtain a PhD at the Free University of Berlin. This was published in Spanish at the Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Berlin.

Between 1995 and 2005 he was a lecturer at the Latin American Institute of the Free University of Berlin and spent one semester as an invited Professor at the Catholic University Chile. In addition, he worked at the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin in the years 1996 to 2002.

In 2003, the Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Berlin published his complete biography of Pablo Neruda, in a private edition with eighty copies. Many reviews discussing this book appeared in Chile, Germany, Mexico and the USA.

At the end of 2004 he made two experimental video films, together with the Chilean poet Anamaria Briede-Westermayer.

Between 2004 and 2007, he revised and updated his Neruda biography  with new documents that were found and published in the meantime. In September 2008, the publishing house RIL Editors in Chile published this new, extended version of the biography of Pablo Neruda in a two volumes edition with 1520 pages. This publication received critical acclaim in important Chilean and Mexican Newspapers such as El Mercurio, La Tercera and Ercilla from Chile and Reforma from Mexico. In the same year he published two further books (in German) on specific aspects of Neruda's life.

Most recently, he has been engaged in research, publishing, and giving lectures in Germany, the Netherlands, Chile and Israel.
Since February 2015 he has been working on a film documentary on the Ladino language, the language of the Sephardic Jews, i.e. those Jews whose ancestors lived on the Iberian Peninsula until they were expelled from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1497. The documentary was completed in February 2018. A second version was created in 2020. The film was shown at the XXXV Festival del Cinema Latino Americano di Trieste in November 2020, and in February 2021 at the XVIIIº Punta del Este Jewish Film Festival, in Punta del Este, Uruguay.
From 6 to 15 November 2021 he was a member of the section "Cinema and Literature" at the XXXVI Ibero-Latin American Film Festival in Trieste.

Movie Trailer:

In 2022, together with animator Jaime Cañas, he completed a 10-minutes short film entitled "Translation one":

A podcast was also published in "Relatos Judíos" (Jewish Stories) with David Schidlowsky:

In 2023 his updated biography of Pablo Neruda was published in German in 2 volumes under the title "Pablo Neruda in seiner Zeit. Dichtung und Politik. Eine Biographie". Volume I: 1904-1949 and volume II: 1949-1973. https://www.wvberlin.com/pages/bakery/pablo-neruda-in-seiner-zeit-1838.php