Gini Alhadeff was born in Alexandria, Egypt, of Italian parents, and left with her family in 1956, at the start of the Suez Canal crisis. In 1961, the family moved to Tokyo and there, at the Sacred Heart, she learned English. At 15, she entered the Poggio Imperiale boarding school in Florence. After graduating, she studied fine art and photography at Harrow, England, and at Pratt Institute in New York. She worked at The Museum of Modern Art, did translations from Italian and French into English, and was employed by two designers in Milan before becoming a freelance writer, a features editor at American Elle, and founding the literary reviews, Normal and XXIst century in New York.