Irina Mashinski was born in Moscow and  graduated from the Physical Geography Department of Moscow University where she completed her Ph.D. (Paleogeography and the Theory of Landscape). During Perestroika, she founded “Bullfinch,” a children’s literary studio in Moscow. In 1991, she moved to the US, where she taught high school mathematics as well as history and meteorology at several universities. Her work has been translated into several languages and has appeared in Poetry International, World Literature Today, Asymptote, Modern Poetry in Translation, and elsewhere. Irina Mashinski is the recipient of several Russian literary awards and, with Boris Dralyuk, of the First Prize in the 2012 Joseph Brodsky / Stephen Spender Translation Prize competition. She recently published two books of prose and essays, And I Thought of Scott (Steklograf, 2025) and The Cave and the Horizon (Esterum Publishing, 2025), both shortlisted for the Andrei Bely Prize, Russia's oldest independent literary award, founded in samizdat in 1978.

She lives  in New Jersey, where she runs Cardinal Points Tutoring.