Nina Paley is a longtime veteran of syndicated comic strips, creating Fluff, The Hots, and the alternative weekly Nina's Adventures. In 1998 she began making independent animated festival films, including the environmental short, The Stork. In 2002 she followed her then-husband to Trivandrum, India, where she read her first Ramayana. This inspired her first feature, Sita Sings the Blues, which she animated and produced over the course of five years on a home computer.

Nina teaches at Parsons School of Design in Manhattan and is a 2006 Guggenheim Fellow.