[2] She began her career as an assistant to directors Krzysztof Zanussi and Andrzej Wajda, and emigrated to France shortly before the 1981 imposition of the martial law in Poland.

[9] She is the daughter of journalists Irena (née Rybczyńska) and Henryk Holland, who had been a prominent Communist activist since 1935 and a captain in the Soviet Army.

[12][13] Her father, Henryk Holland, lost his parents in a ghetto during the Holocaust, and spent most of his adult life denying his own Jewishness.

Holland's Catholic mother aided several Jews during the Holocaust and received the Righteous Among the Nations medal from the Yad Vashem Institute in Israel.

[14] When she was eleven, her parents, whose marriage had been continuously contentious, divorced, and her mother soon remarried a Jewish journalist, Stanisław Brodski.

Holland witnessed the Prague Spring of 1968 while in Czechoslovakia, and was arrested for her support of the dissident movement for the government reforms and political liberalization.

She was first assistant director on Wajda's 1976 Man of Marble, an experience which gave her the capability to explore political and moral issues within the confines of an oppressive regime.

Her first major film was Provincial Actors (Aktorzy Prowincjonalni), a 1978 chronicle of tense backstage relations within a small-town theater company which was an allegory of Poland's contemporary political situation.

Knowing she could not return to communist Poland, Holland wrote scripts for fellow Polish filmmakers in exile: Wajda's Danton, A Love in Germany (1983), The Possessed (1988) and Korczak (1990).

[19] Holland received an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film for Angry Harvest, a West German production about a Jewish woman on the run during World War II.

These works have been controversial because of Holland's commitment to realism, and the acceptance of all types of individuals both as victims and as flawed human beings deserving of guilt.

A world in which wisdom, if it exists at all, lies in accepting the violence and human frailty in everyone, without exception, including Jewish people".

The characters of In Darkness are shown as having some strong similarities, despite the fact that the realities for Jews and ethnic Poles, specifically those depicted in the film, are extremely different.

By comparing the Polish protagonist to the Jewish ones, Holland recreates the morally confusing and physically brutal world that though very different for those who were hunted, was everywhere during the Third Reich.

Holland had been treated to a day at Disneyland by the American Academy when she was in the running as a nominee for a foreign Oscar for her film Angry Harvest.

[21] A friend of Polish writer and director Krzysztof Kieślowski, Holland collaborated on the screenplay for his film, Three Colors: Blue.

She suggested that when she was making films in Poland under the Communist regime, there was an atmosphere of cross-gender solidarity against censorship (the main political issue).

Show runner David Simon said that Holland was "wonderful behind the camera" and staged the fight between Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell in "Moral Midgetry" well.

On 5 February 2009, the Krakow Post reported that Holland would direct a biopic about Krystyna Skarbek entitled Christine: War My Love.

[5] Holland accepted an offer to film a three-part drama for HBO about Jan Palach, who immolated himself in January 1969 to protest "normalization" after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968.

The resulting miniseries, Burning Bush, has been shown in Poland and Germany[36] and selected for a Special Presentation screening at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival.

[38] On 1 December 2013, the film screened at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, where Holland was invited to deliver the Rajiv Vaidya Memorial Lecture: Viewing History through the Filmmaker's Lens.

In December 2013, Holland was announced as director of NBC's next miniseries Rosemary's Baby, a two-part version of the best selling novel by Ira Levin with Zoe Saldana.

[42] In March 2016, it was announced that Holland was set to direct an adaptation of Peter Swanson's best-selling novel The Kind Worth Killing, a psychological thriller about a ruthless female killer.

[45] On 23 November 2019, Agnieszka Holland and Anne Applebaum were awarded Orders of Princess Olga, 3rd Class by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for their efforts in promoting the memory of the Holodomor.

[51][52][53] In October 2023, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association selected Holland as the winner of the association's Career Achievement Award stating that "With moral clarity, deep empathy and invigorating filmmaking, her work lays bare the damage that oppressive regimes and sociopolitical conflicts wreak on everyday souls".