Born in 1943, grew up in Geneva and Darmstadt. 1961 studied at the Académie Charpentier in Paris, 1962-63 internship as a stage designer at the Grand-Théâtre and studied at the Haute école d'art et de design in Geneva, from 1963 studied at the École Cantonale des Beaux-Arts et Arts Appliqués ECAL in Lausanne. 1967 works in New York in an interior design office. 1968 travelled through New Mexico and California.
1968 first sculptural works in Paris. 1970 exhibition of Plexiglas sculptures at the Festival des arts plastiques in Montargis, France. 1972 sculptures made of metal and stone in combination with Plexiglas and Tetrahedrons with incisions calculated by halving the angles or the length of the sides in the ground plan of the triangle.
1975 first Ergänzungen, material combinations of wood and Plexiglas, which will form a comprehensive group of works. In 1975 Vera Röhm photographed her sculpture The Tree in the Messel Pit, which was hardly known at the time. After exploring the Marais and other quarter of Paris, she began to create the photographic cycle Stützwerke from 1977 as prints on photographic canvas and with serial reworkings. The photographic series Windbruch im Wald followed in 1981, and in the same year the work Skogsordbok was realised. In 1983 Vera Röhm designed the stage set for La nuit juste avant les forêts by Bernard-Marie Koltès under the direction of Sigrid Herzog for the Munich Theatre Festival.
From 1983 onwards, the visual representation of time, space and movement formed the basis of the ongoing cycle of works Topography of Time. In drawings, reliefs, sculptures and spatial installations, it is dedicated to capturing the changing shadows of a geometric body over the course of a day. From 1985, Vera Röhm worked on the polyglot cycle of works Die Nacht ist der Schatten der Erde (Night is the Earth’s Shadow), which to date has been translated into over 1,200 languages.
In 1989 Vera Röhm collaborated with the dancer Gerhard Bohner in creating an installation with nine Ergänzungen for his choreography Im (goldenen) Schnitt I, (Through space, through the body), which premiered at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. Since 1996, the solo performance has been adopted and danced by Cesc Gelabert in Europe, Japan, Australia and China. Performances have included 2001/2002 at the Centre Pompidou Paris as part of the Festival d'Automne, 2010 at the PACT Zollverein Essen and 2013 at the Edinburgh International Festival.
Competition wins include the art-in-architecture project Progression for the Landeszentralbank Iserlohn in 1986, the glass labyrinth Du sollst - Du sollst nicht in the courtyard of the Göttingen District Court in 1994, the Shadow Relief 0°-360° for the new building of the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research in Darmstadt in 1997 and Topographie der Zeit - Schattenwanderungen for the forecourt of a primary school in Darmstadt-Kranichstein in 2003. Further invitations to participate in competitions for art-in-architecture and art in public space projects in Germany and abroad.
In 1995, Vera Röhm travelled to New Delhi, Jaipur and Ujjain to document historical Indian observatories and produced large-format baryta prints from the photographs she took there, which she showed in 1998/1999 in the exhibition halls of the Institut Mathildenhöhe Darmstadt as part of the solo exhibition Schattenwanderungen.
The first Swimming Verses (Paul Éluard) were created in 2002 for Art CANAL as part of the Intercontinental Sculpture Exhibition on the Zihl Canal between Bienne and Neuchâtel, followed in 2009 by the verses Echo and Narcissus from Ovid's ‘Metamorphoses’ in the Schloss- und Kurparkweiher Bad Homburg at Blickachsen 7.
In 1997 Vera Röhm receives the Wilhelm Loth Prize of the City of Darmstadt, in 2003 the Johann Heinrich Merck Honour of the City of Darmstadt. In 2004, the Simon Spierer collection A Forest of Sculptures, which includes a Ergänzung, is donated to the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt. 2009-2012 the 10 metre high sculpture Licht-Strahl-Eiche is created. It is unveiled in 2015 as a purchase for the collection at the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt. 2010 the first Spiegelbaum for the International Forest Art Trail follows. 2011 her drawing Winkel-Ergänzung Beta 75° was acquired for the Graphic Collection of the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt. In 2018, the 8-metre-high sculpture Rhythmus 800 is installed in the park of the Fondation Vasarely, Aix en Provence, as part of the MP2018 (Marseille-Provence 2018) cultural year. It has been part of the Fondation Vasarely's collection since 2021.
Since 2020, several large sculptures have been created, including different variations from the series of Bogentore as well as Scheibenbäume and Spiegelbäume. The Mammutbaum, a 21-metre-high bronze sculpture, is currently being realised. In 2023, Vera Röhm will present GLOBUS for the first time in Paris, a spatial installation with sound and videomapping that incorporates hundreds of translations of the sentence Night is the Earth’s Shadow. The installation Laborinth with the graphic representation of the sentence in different languages will be expanded to 500 translations.
Vera Röhm is a member of the Darmstadt Secession. Her works can be found in numerous international collections and museums. She lives in Darmstadt and Paris.