After earning his BA in the Television and Film Department at the University of Missouri Kansas City and California State University in San Diego, he moved to Berlin in 1995 to begin a career as a screenwriter with the Frankfurt-based Verlag der Autoren. There, he worked on both feature films and documentary productions.

His documentary films include Homemade Hillbilly Jam (2005) [co-writer and editor], which was shown in cinemas and at festivals and distributed internationally. Additionally, the documentary Forgetting Dad (2008) [co-director and editor], co-produced by ZDF’s Das kleine Fernsehspiel, won the Special Jury Prize at IDFA and received the rating “Highly Recommended.” In collaboration with the London-based company Oxford Films, Matt Sweetwood worked as an editor on the award-winning BBC production The Love of Books (2012). He won first prize at the BR-Telepool Documentary Competition in 2009 for Beerland (2013), for which he was both writer and director. He is the owner of the production company Sweetwood Films, based in Potsdam, through which The Beer Jesus from America (2018) was produced and internationally distributed in collaboration with Rive Gauche TV. His editing studio hosted such award winning TV and cinema documentary “The Strait Guys”(2022), on which he was writer and editor based from his studio. Matt is currently developing new projects with his company Sweetwood Films. He also works a freelancer, teacher, vocal artist, and is member of the documentary guild AG DOK.