Born Elizabeth Rist on June 21, 1962, in Rheintal, Switzerland, Pipilotti Rist combined her childhood nickname, Lotti, with the first name of the Swedish children's story character Pippi Longstocking to create her artistic moniker in 1982. She attended the Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna from 1982 to 1986 and the Schule für Gestaltung Basel from 1986 to 1988. She produced her first video, I'm Not the Girl Who Misses Much (1986), while still at school in Basel. In it, she bounces up and down, falling out of her dress, as she repeatedly sings the title line (derived from the lyrics to a Beatles song). From 1988 to 1994, she played in a rock band called Les Reines Prochaines, while in her art she developed an aesthetic language quite close to that of music videos. The artist appears in many of her own videos and often sings on the soundtracks; her mother, brother, and three sisters frequently assist on the production. Rist has also developed installations such as Flying Room (1995) and Himalaya's Sister's Living Room (2000), in which video cameras and monitors are wittily deployed in furnished gallery spaces.

In 1997, Rist received a Premio 2000 award at the Venice Biennale for the video Ever Is Over All (1997), in which a young woman smashes car windows with a large red flower. Three years later, with Open My Glade (2000), commissioned by the New York Public Art Fund, the artist broadcast a series of sixteen one-minute video segments on the largest video screen in Times Square in New York. Interspersed with television programming, this collection of short videos consisted of close-up shots of her face as she uttered poetic, philosophical, and political statements. In the multichannel video installation Stir Heart, Rinse Heart (2003), commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, a group of found plastic objects–including egg cartons, clear tubes, and coffee-cup lids–hang from the ceiling, acting as mini animated screens catching projected images of waves and what seems to be magnified blood, all in saturated colors.

Since Rist's first solo exhibition, in 1984, she has had shows at the Kunstverein in Hamburg, Germany (1995), Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (1996), SITE Santa Fe (1998), Musée d'Art Contemporain de Montréal (2000), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid (2001), and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2004), among other venues. Her work has also appeared in the Venice Biennale (1993, 1999, and 2005), São Paulo Bienal (1995), Biennale d'Art Contemporain de Lyon (1997), Berlin Biennale (1998), International Biennial Exhibition at SITE Santa Fe (1999), Biennale of Sydney (2000), and International Triennale of Contemporary Art in Yokohama (2001). She lives and works in Zurich.