Moaveni grew up in San Jose, California, and studied politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She won a Fulbright Fellowship to Egypt, and studied Arabic at the American University in Cairo.

For three years, Azadeh Moaveni worked across the Middle East as a reporter for Time, before joining the Los Angeles Times to cover the war in Iraq. On February 4, 2005 Azadeh released her first book, a memoir entitled Lipstick Jihad, which details her time in Iran and the quest to discover more about her cultural identity. She co-authored Iran Awakening with Shirin Ebadi. She is married and lives in London with her husband and son, and reports on Iran and the Middle East for Time. She recently worked with editor David Ebershoff on a new memoir, Honeymoon in Tehran: Two years of love and danger in Iran, for Random House, published on April 13, 2009.