[5] Tikhonova was born in Dresden, East Germany, the younger of two daughters of Vladimir Putin and Lyudmila Putina (née Shkrebneva).

[6] Later, during violent gang wars involving the Tambov Gang while it was taking control of Saint Petersburg's energy trade, she and her sister Maria were sent by their father, who feared for their safety, to Germany where their legal guardian was former Stasi officer Matthias Warnig, who had worked with their father in Dresden as part of a KGB cell and established the Dresdner Bank branch in Saint Petersburg.

[15] Tikhonova is the director of Innopraktika, a $1.7 billion development project to create a science center at Moscow State University.

[9] In February 2020, Innopraktika announced that Tikhonova was appointed head of a new artificial intelligence institute at Moscow State University.

In December 2019, Tikhonova became a member of the Council for the Development of Physical Culture and Mass Sports under the Government of the Russian Federation.

[25][26] In the mid-2010s, Tikhonova was fond of acrobatic rock'n'roll – a rare, non-Olympic sport, in the world ranking of which there are only about two hundred people.

From 2016 to 2019, in the Moscow region, at the sports school where Tikhonova studied, an acrobatic rock and roll center was built for 2 billion rubles.

[28][30] On 6 April 2022, because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Tikhonova was sanctioned by the United States due to her being an adult child of Vladimir Putin.