Ovsiankina's father founded the first Russian-Asian bank and was the owner of a coal mine.
After the Russian Revolution, she immigrated to Berlin because of political upheaval and it was common for wealthy parents to send their children elsewhere for school.
Due to there being no such program available to her, she studied personality at the Psychological Institute at the University of Berlin.
Her classmates included now well-known psychologists Tamara Dembo, Gita Birenbaum, and Bluma Zeigarnik.
She received a PhD at the University of Giessen in 1928, with her thesis focused on how people act when they are interrupted from completing a certain task, which was later termed the Ovsiankina effect.
[1] After Ovsiankina completed graduate school, she held psychology jobs in Germany for several years.