Born in Brooklyn in 1964 to a schoolteacher and a child psychologist, Nottage attended New York's High School of Music and Art. Inspired by school productions of Annie and The Wiz, she penned her first play, The Darker Side of Verona, which told the story of an African American Shakespearean company. After attending Brown University and the Yale School of Drama, Nottage worked in Amnesty International's press office for four years.

Her best-known play is Intimate Apparel, co-commissioned and produced at Baltimore's Center Stage (where it premiered in February 2003) and South Coast Repertory. It was highly acclaimed in its Off-Broadway production in 2004, starring Viola Davis. She wrote a companion piece to Intimate Apparel, the OBIE award winning Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine, which is set 100 years later. The West Coast premiere of her Crumbs from the Table of Joy, at South Coast Repertory, earned two NAACP Theatre Awards for performance.

Nottage's play, Ruined, dramatizes the plight of Congolese women surviving civil war. It was first was performed in 2007 in the Goodman Theater New Stages Series in Chicago, and transferred to New York at the Manhattan Theatre Club. Ruined was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in April 2009. Her other plays include the children’s musical, A Walk Through Time; Mud, River, Stone (Blackburn Prize finalist); Por’knockers; Poof! (Heideman Award); and Las Meninas.

Nottage's plays have been produced Off-Broadway and regionally by The Acting Company, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Alliance Theatre Company, Capital Repertory Theatre, Crossroads Theatre, Freedom Repertory Theatre, Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan Theatre Club, San Jose Repertory Theatre, Second Stage Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Studio Arena Theatre, Vineyard Theatre, Yale Repertory Theatre, The Goodman Theater, The Guthrie, and many others.

She has been awarded playwriting fellowships from Manhattan Theatre Club, New Dramatists, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is also the recipient of a Playwrights Horizons Amblin/Dreamworks commission and a National Endowment for the Arts/Theatre Communications Group grant for a year-long residency at Freedom Repertory Theaterr in Philadelphia. Nottage is an alumnus of New Dramatists.

On May 13, 2009, Nottage spoke at a public reception in Washington, DC following a United States Senate Foreign Relations joint subcommittee hearing entitled "Confronting Rape and Other Forms of Violence Against Women in Conflict Zones," with case studies on the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan.

By The Way, Meet Vera Stark will have its world premiere at Second Stage Theatre, an Off-Broadway company, in the 2010-11 season.