Born in Moscow to Nikolai (Carl) Eduardovich Bromley, a Russian industrialist of English origins, Nadezhda Bromley graduated from the Music and Drama School at the Russian Philharmonics and in 1908 joined the Moscow Art Theatre, with which she stayed until 1922.

In 1911 she debuted as a poet with the collection Pathos (Пафос), experimenting in the vein of early Russian futurism and was for a while close to the Centrifuge group, led by Nikolai Aseyev and Boris Pasternak.

[1] In 1918, she joined the MAT First Studio where she had moderate success as an actress (the nymph queen Goplana in Balladyna by Juliusz Słowacki, Erik's mother in August Strindberg's Erik XIV, Lear's fool in King Lear) and also debuted as a director, with The Daughter of Iorio by Gabriele D'Annunzio.

Bromley's short stories came out in two collections, The Confession of the Unwise (Исповедь неразумных, 1927) and Gargantua's Descendant (Потомок Гаргантюа, 1930).

She joined the Academic Pushkin Theatre where she played (to much acclaim) Catherine the First in Peter the First by Alexey Nikolayevich Tolstoy (which she also directed) as well as produced and directed numerous plays including her own, The Duel (1934), after the eponymous Anton Chekhov's novella.