Hans-Otto Schmidt was born in 1945 in Bützow, Mecklenburg. In 1961 he began an apprenticeship as a carpenter before working as a qualified woodworker. He later joined the Landestheater Halle as a stage technician and, from 1965, worked at several theatres in East Berlin. That same year he began his artistic practice as a self-taught artist. In 1972 he became a member of the Association of Visual Artists of the GDR and exhibited his work publicly for the first time. From 2001 he lived and worked in Luisenhof, Uckermark. He died in Berlin in 2025.