Nancy Zimmerman was born and raised in Skokie, Illinois, the youngest of two girls. She graduated from Brown University in 1985.

Zimmerman co-founded Bracebridge Capital with Gabriel Sunshine in 1994 with $50 million in seed investment from Farallon Capital and Yale’s investment office. The fund also manages investments for Princeton University. As of June 2019, it had over $12 billion of assets under management.

Zimmerman’s investments in Russia made national headlines in 1997 when the USAID ended a $14 million grant to the Harvard Institute for International Development, headed by Zimmerman’s husband, after he was accused of using the institute to help Zimmerman with her investments. As part of a settlement, Zimmerman subsequently paid $1.5 million to the USG through one of her companies, Farallon Fixed Income Associates. Neither Zimmerman nor her husband admitted wrongdoing.

In 2016, Bracebridge and a group of hedge funds successfully contested the debt obligations of Argentina in a New York court of law. Under the deal negotiated, the hedge funds received about 75% of their judgements with Bracebridge receiving 92% gains, or $1.1 billion on an investment of $120 million.

Zimmerman is married to Andrei Shleifer, a professor of economics at Harvard University. She is Jewish. As of June 2019, she was worth an estimated $740 million and ranked #32 on Forbes 2019 America’s Self-Made Women List.