Born in Zurich, Liliane Ott moved to Auckland, New Zealand, as a teenager with the goal of studying at an English-language film school. She began her studies in Directing & Writing for Film and Theatre at the UNITEC School of Performing and Screen Arts in January 2001. After returning to Switzerland in 2004, she worked in various assistant roles in the film and theater industry. In 2009, during her time at Das Kollektiv für audiovisuelle Werke GmbH, she produced the feature film Soundless Wind Chime, which was presented in the Forum section of the Berlinale that same year. In the fall of 2010, her play BARX premiered at Rote Fabrik. In 2012, she participated in the Berlinale Talent Campus and directed the short film In kleinen Dosen in 2013. She directed and staged DU/MMES HUHN, a monologue by Stephan Teuwissen, which was performed in both Zurich and Schaffhausen, and co-produced the feature film Stoma by Kit Hung—in collaboration with Xtreme Pictures Ltd. in Hong Kong and the Decoy Collective in Bern. The premiere of Stoma was planned for the 2020 Hong Kong International Film Festival, where the film was nominated for the Firebird Award (Chinese Language). After a long-standing collaboration with Judith Lichtneckert, Liliane Ott became a partner and producer at Emilia Productions in early 2019. Together, they produced the collective documentary Les Nouvelles Èves, which was shown at the Zurich Film Festival in 2021 and subsequently screened in cinemas across Switzerland.

At the same time, she founded the independent production company Kalliopeia GmbH, with which she is currently developing a broad range of projects. In 2024, she co-directed the collective film Hotel Excelsior—the winning project of the Fast Track 2023 program by the Zurich Film Foundation—alongside Jessy Moravec, Talkhon Hamzavi, and Martin Skalsky. The film is currently being distributed.