Maria Bamford was born on September 3, 1970 at the Port Hueneme Naval Base in Port Hueneme, California. At the time, her father, Joel Bamford, was serving as a Navy doctor. She grew up in Duluth, Minnesota, where she attended Chester Park Elementary and Duluth Marshall School. Bamford has stated that when she was younger she was often troubled with her anxiety, depression, and bouts of what she has called “Unwanted Thoughts Syndrome”, a subset of obsessive–compulsive disorder.

Upon graduating high school, she attended Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, but in 1992, Bamford transferred to the University of Edinburgh in Scotland at the start of her junior year. While at the university she became the first female member of the college’s improvised comedy group, The Improverts. After a year in Scotland, she transferred back to her home state and enrolled at the University of Minnesota, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in creative writing. She started doing stand-up in Minneapolis, Minnesota at age 19, at Stevie Ray’s Comedy Cabaret.

Her album Unwanted Thoughts Syndrome, produced by Comedy Central Records, was released in April 2009 and includes a DVD containing The Maria Bamford Show episodes. During the Christmas 2009-2010 shopping seasons, Bamford was featured in a series of Target commercials, portraying an overachieving shopper determined to be first in line. For Christmas 2009, she released a free stand-up special online as a gift to her fans.

In 2012 she released The Special Special Special for download through Chill.com. The special was recorded at her own home in Los Angeles with only Bamford’s parents present as the audience and is now available on Netflix.

In 2013, Bamford created and starred in a web series called Ask My Mom. Maria plays both herself and her mother, who answers questions sent in by fans. Also in 2013, Bamford appeared as herself in one episode of the interview web series All Growz Up with Melinda Hill. She provides the voice of Pema in Nickelodeon cartoon The Legend of Korra.

In 2013, she appeared in season four of Arrested Development as Debrie Bardeaux, Tobias Fünke’s love interest. The series creator noted Bamford as a comical “genius” and said that “real artists [like Maria] talk about things that nobody else talks about, and talk about them candidly.” She remained on the series until it concluded in 2019.

She appeared in Season 3 of Louis C.K.’s Louie. In 2014, she co-created, wrote, and starred in The Program with Melinda Hill, produced by Funny or Die. In 2014, she won the American Comedy Award for Best Club Comic. In January 2016, she was a guest on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, where host Stephen Colbert called her his “favorite comedian on planet Earth”.

On December 11, 2014, during her show at the Neptune Theater in Seattle, Bamford announced that she was engaged to artist Scott Marvel Cassidy. They were married at a private ceremony in 2015. Bamford has one sister, Sarah Seidelmann, who is a life coach and shaman. She has a private residence in Los Angeles, California as well as a home in Altadena, California. She is also a fan of pugs, and typically owns at least one senior pug at any given time.

In early 2016, Netflix announced the creation of an original series based on Bamford’s life. The series, called Lady Dynamite, has Bamford in the lead role. In May 2016, the series went live on the Netflix streaming service. Bamford was asked to be involved in the writing process. She did not write any episodes herself, but was often in the writers’ room, discussing ideas and “hanging out” with the writers. The writers had freedom to modify her experiences for creative purposes.

In May 2017, Bamford was the commencement speaker for the University of Minnesota’s College of Liberal Arts. During the speech, she gave a cheque made out to Sallie Mae for $5,000, her net speaking fee, to a graduate in the audience who had student loans.

In April 2018, Bamford appeared on season 13 of Worst Cooks in America. She was eliminated in the fourth episode.