Simonyan was born in the southern Russian city of Krasnodar, into an Armenian family. Both of her parents are descendants of Armenian refugees from the Ottoman Empire. Her father's family, originally from Trabzon, settled in Crimea during the Armenian genocide of 1915. During World War II, they were deported by Beria's NKVD to the Urals along with thousands of other Hamshen Armenians. While her father was born in Yekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk), her mother was born in Sochi to an Armenian family that had fled the massacres of the Armenians by the Turks in the late 19th century. Her family owns a restaurant in Moldovka town in Adlersky City District, Sochi. She is from a working-class family and decided at an early age she wanted to become a journalist. She first worked for the local newspaper, and then for a local television station while studying journalism at Kuban State University.