Mitochondria dynamically adapt to cellular stress to ensure cell survival. The stress-regulated mitochondrial peptidase OMA1 orchestrates these adaptive responses, which limit mitochondrial fusion and promote mitochondrial stress signaling and metabolic rewiring. Here, we show that cellular stress adaptation involves OMA1-mediated regulation of mitochondrial protein import and OXPHOS biogenesis. OMA1 cleaves the mitochondrial chaperone DNAJC15 and promotes its degradation by the m-AAA protease AFG3L2. Loss of DNAJC15 impairs mitochondrial protein import and restricts OXPHOS biogenesis under conditions of mitochondrial dysfunction. Non-imported mitochondrial preproteins accumulate at the endoplasmic reticulum inducing an unfolded protein response. Our results demonstrate stress-dependent changes in mitochondrial protein import as part of the OMA1-mediated mitochondrial stress response and highlight the interdependence of proteostasis regulation between different organelles. In this dataset, we aimed to identifiy were mitochondrial proteins are localized when they cannot be imported into mitochondrial at given rate.