[7] Livingston attended Beverly Hills High School[8] and graduated from Yale University in 1983, where she studied photography, drawing, and painting with a minor in English Literature.

In 2018, Pratt Institute's Black Lives Matter student group kicked off their weekend of events with a screening of the film and discussion.

The collaborative team that made Paris is Burning and that made it possible include executive producers Madison Davis Lacy and Nigel Finch, editor Jonathan Oppenheim, director of photography Paul Gibson, co-producer Barry Swimar, associate producer Claire Goodman, production manager Natalie Hill, and many others.

Initially released in 1991, the film continues to screen worldwide at festivals, universities, museums, and community groups, and attracts a multi-generational audience.

Hotheads, a 1993 documentary created through the AIDS research-friendly Red Hot Organization, explores two comedians' responses to violence against women: cartoonist Diane Dimassa, and writer/performer Reno.

Livingston first started working on the project in 2000,[16] wanting to explore the topics of loss and grief after having lost her father, mother, grandfather, uncle, and brother between 1990 and 2000.

[17] Livingston has also been developing Prenzlauer Berg, an ensemble episodic project set in the art worlds of New York and East Berlin in the late 1980s.

[18] In 2011, Livingston directed a video for Elton John's show The Million Dollar Piano at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas; the piece is a series of black and white moving-image portraits of a variety of New Yorkers that accompanies the song "Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters".

Fellowships have included the Guggenheim Foundation, the Getty Center, the German Academic Exchange (DAAD), The MacDowell Colony, and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).

Since 2018, Livingston has been a consulting producer on the FX tv drama series Pose, which is "heavily inspired" by her documentary Paris Is Burning.