Matrena Pankratjevna Vakhrusheva was born on 12 April 1918 in Kharmpavyl [ru] in the Kondinsky District of the Ostyak–Vogul National Okrug of Soviet Russia to Ekaterina Semenovna (née Alagulova) and Pankratia Mikhailovich Vakhrushev.

[1] With the advent of the Great Depression, collectivization of farming, anti-kulak campaign and purges of the 1930s, the family were forcibly separated and their movable goods redistributed.

Pankratia, as "the son of a kulak", was able to keep the ancestral land to feed his family, but had to move to various villages around Tobolsk, while Ekaterina cared for the younger children in Kharmpavyl.

[1][2] Vakhrusheva began writing her own poems and translated some of the stories of Vladimir Korolenko, Dmitry Mamin-Sibiryak, and Alexander Pushkin into the Mansi language.

During the Siege of Leningrad in the day, she worked with the Sanitation squadron at the evacuation hospital and dug trenches, and at night helped extinguish bombs on building rooftops.

[7][8] That year, Vakhrusheva returned to Leningrad to begin her graduate studies at Andrei A. Zhdanov State University on the grammar of the Mansi language.

[3][7] In 1949, while she was still working on her thesis, Формирование сложных слов мансийского языка на базе соматической лексики [на материале кондинского диалекта] (Formation of complex words of the Mansi language on the basis of somatic vocabulary [based on the material of the Kondinian dialect]), Vakhrusheva began teaching Mansi at the A. I. Herzen Pedagogical Institute.

[7] One of her doctoral advisors, Alexei Nikolayevich Balandin, who would later become her husband, encouraged her to write literature to create texts in her native language for students.

Teaching for 46 years at the A. I. Herzen Pedagogical Institute, she published around 24 textbooks and influenced generations of students, like Nina Lyskova, Evdokia Nemysova, Anastasia Saynakhova, Yuvan Shestalov, Valentina Solovar, and Andrei Tarkhanov [ru], among others.

[16] On the centennial of her birth in 2018, her alma mater, now known as the Khanty-Mansiysk Technological and Pedagogical College, hosted a celebration to honor her contributions to their school and the indigenous community.