Born Ann Marilyn Evans to Eric Charles Evans and Joyce Florence Evans, Strathern was educated at Bromley High School and at Girton College, Cambridge. In 1963 she married another anthropologist, Andrew Strathern, and they had three children though the marriage was later dissolved.

Strathern was a visiting professor at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia and the University of California, Berkeley. From 1985 to 1993 she was Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, before returning to take a chair at the University of Cambridge. In addition was Mistress of Girton College from 1998 to 2009.

Strathern has conducted fieldwork in Papua New Guinea and the United Kingdom: her anthropological work has used Melanesian conceptions, as well as feminist insights, to question the universality of some Western categories often taken to be fundamental: society, the individual, relation, property, substance, effect, nature, culture and so on. She has also written about new reproductive technologies and intellectual property law and her most recent work focuses on the complexities of transparency, accountability, and audit, especially within the academy.