Lund was born Zoë Tamerlis on February 9, 1962 to mother Barbara Lekberg, an American sculptor of Swedish descent, and Victor Tamerlis, who was of Romanian descent. She dropped out of college.

From 1979 to 1986, she was the companion of Edouard de Laurot. Both David Scott Milton and Jonas Mekas claim that Laurot co-wrote most of the screenplay of Bad Lieutenant. Laurot also co-wrote Lund’s book Curfew: USA. After Laurot’s death in 1993, and before Lund’s in 1999, the latter bequeathed the manuscript of a novel the former had written to Mekas.

Three years after Ms .45 was released in 1981, Lund got her second chance to star in a movie, this time in a role that required her to play two different roles. Special Effects was written and directed by Larry Cohen. In it he cast Lund as a wannabe starlet who is murdered on film by a fallen director portrayed by Eric Bogosian, who then finds a lookalike to take her place in the movie he decides to make around the snuff footage. As the starlet, Lund’s voice was dubbed by another actress, meaning it wasn’t until an hour into her second movie that audiences finally got to hear her distinctly New Yorker inflections (Lund’s character in Ms. 45 was mute).

In 1986, she started dating her future husband, Robert Lund. They lived together in an apartment located on 10th Street, and according to Paul Rachman, the Lunds reportedly owned “dozens of roaming pet rats.” The couple were married later that year. That same year, Lund got an abortion.

According to Abel Ferrara: “…one time in the 90s, we were going to try to do Pasolini’s story but only with Zoe as Pasolini; a female director living the life that Pasolini lived.” However, her death led to a fifteen-year hiatus with the project until Ferrara’s film Pasolini (2014) was released. In 1996, Lund also wrote the first draft of New Rose Hotel (1998).

Although they never got divorced, Lund and her husband separated in 1997 when the former moved to Paris where she lived with “her new boyfriend” until her death in 1999.

Lund died in Paris on April 16, 1999 of heart failure, due to extended cocaine use, which replaced her long-term heroin use after her move to Paris in 1997. She was 37.

“I’ve known a lot of serious drug users,” Richard Hell, a friend of Lund’s, recalled in 2002, “but Zoë was Queen. You’ve got to admire someone as committed to it as she was. She didn’t just LOVE heroin, she believed in it.”

In 2007, experimental group Bodega System released the album “Blood Pyx”. The cover features Zoë as photographed by her widower, Robert Lund. In the early 2000s, American Hardcore director Paul Rachman made two documentary shorts about Lund’s life: Zoe XO (2004) and Zoe Rising (2009). In the former short, Robert Lund discusses their relationship, while in the latter Zoë’s mother Barbara Lekberg focuses more on her childhood.

Abel Ferrara said of Lund in a 2012 interview, “Zoe was a brilliant, creative person before the drugs, the drugs just killed her.”