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Nina Hamnett was born February 14, 1890 in Tenby, South Wales. She attended the Royal School in Bath, and then studied at the Dublin School of Art, the Pelham Art School and the London School of Art. Primarily a portrait and landscape painter, Hamnett exhibited at the New English Art Club, the Royal Academy and the London Group in England, and at the Salon d'Automne in Paris. She taught at the Westminster Technical Institute from 1917 to 1918.

A distinguished artist for nearly forty years, Hamnett derived her greatest acclaim from her association with Bloomsbury artist Roger Fry during the first three decades of the twentieth century. One of the first artists to get paid for work at Fry's Omega Workshops in Fitzroy Square, Hamnett assisted in the avant-garde productions of fabrics, clothes, murals, furniture, rugs, etc. Shortly after she joined the workshop in 1913, her paintings were featured in several group exhibits of contributing Omega artists, which included Vanessa Bell, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Duncan Grant, among others. She also illustrated The People's Album of London Statues (1928) by Osbert Sitwell and The Silent Queen (1927) by Seymour Leslie.

In 1932 she published Laughing Torso, reminiscences of her bohemian life, which become a bestseller in England and America. She published Is She a Lady?, a sequential autobiographical account, in 1955.

Hamnett lived in London and Paris most of her life. She was briefly married in 1914 to Roald Kristian, also known as Count Edgar de Bergen. She died December 16, 1956.