Nandana Sen's father is Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen and mother is Bengali writer Nabanita Dev Sen. She was born in Calcutta.
Nandana's very first acting experience was a student adventure, when director Gautam Ghose convinced her to take break from her classes to play the adolescent heroine of his film The Doll, a complex story about an older man's dual obession with his friend's young daughter and a ventriloquist's doll. In 2008 she appeared in the British television series Sharpe, in the episode Sharpe's Peril.
Nandana was first seen on the Indian screen as Rani Mukherjee's jealous seventeen-years-old sister in Black, followed by lead roles in Ram Gopal Verma's My Wife's Murder and Nitin Manmohan's Tango Charlie.
She dated Madhu Varma, nephew of director Ram Gopal Varma.