Gina Barkhordar Nahai was born and grew up in Iran during the Shah's reign to a Persian Jewish family, and left with her family shortly before the country's revolution. At age 13, she began attending boarding school in Switzerland and later moved to the United States in 1977, arriving in Los Angeles the night Elvis Presley died. At the time, she did not realize she was leaving Iran for good. In college, she studied political science, including Iran's pre- and post-revolutionary politics, at the University of California, Los Angeles for both her bachelor's and master's of art degrees. Nahai speaks Persian, English, French, and Spanish.