Niemeyer was born in the Hanseatic city of Bremen and took her A-levels at the Kippenberg Gymnasium. She studied journalism, German philology and film studies at the Sorbonne in Paris and Freien Universität Berlin from 1984 till 1990. At her dissertation, which she handed in only a couple of months after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, she studied the film history of the DDR and its film company DEFA which had been largely unknown in West Germany.