Jennifer Natalya Fink is the spawn of a yeast geneticist and modern dancer. Her family's roots are in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where she is distantly related to the "Brazilian Picasso," Lasar Segall, and in the Pale of Settlement, where she is intimately related to failed opera singers, successful socialists, and Gracie Allen. She was born in 1966 in Washington, DC, where she is currently Assistant Professor of English at Georgetown University, but her childhood was spent in Ithaca, New York. Her father is a yeast geneticist, which involved much home brewing of beer and recombining of DNA. Her mother, a transplanted Julliard-trained dancer,, taught special ed. in a high school with cows in the front yard, and went on to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard, and write books about successful dyslexics. Her sister is a feminist Orthodox Jewish lawyer. Paradox runs in the family.

After a Rushmore-like adolescence misspent writing, producing, directing, and starring in Oscar Wilde-meets-Days of Our Lives gestamptkunstwerks, she went on to Wesleyan, where she discovered '80s Manhattan and '70s performance art. After earning an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she alienated numerous audiences in her infamous performances of a hybrid Marilyn Monroe/Ethel Rosenberg she pursued (chased by a bear) a Ph.D at NYU, which she completed with honors in 1997 under the guidance of Peggy Phelan. That project, on the complex acoustic tango between the performative and the constative in such unlikely sites as Anne Sexton's poetry had the equally unlikely effect of catapulting her into her present work, which delicately undoes the old wounds (apologies to Sexton) of possession, historical memory as it lives in the cells and psyche, lust, lustmorte, postcolonial Jewishness, socialist history, and the tension between the body and the flesh.

She is the author of the novels V and Burn and co-editor of the anthology Performing Hybridity. She lives, appropriately enough, on top of Mount Zion in a converted barn in upstate New York with her partner, lawyer/poet Sarah Sohn, and many a field mouse.