A graduate of the Tashkent State University, Svetlana Gorshenina defended her first PhD thesis in 1996 under the direction of Galina Pugachenkova and Valery Germanov at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan.
Then she has a second doctorate in 2007 at the Universities of Lausanne and Paris I-Sorbonne (under the direction of Henri-Paul Francfort and Patrick Sériot), and finally, in 2016, a habilitation on the cultural heritage of Turkestan at the Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO, Paris).
Later she has worked as a researcher and/or lecturer at the Collège de France (Frantz Grenet’s Departement, Paris), the École normale supérieure - ENS ("Hellenisms of Asia and Oriental Civilisations", Paris), the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences - EHESS (Paris) and the University of Lausanne and University of Manchester (grant of the Swiss National Science Foundation).
She was also Director of the "Central Asia Programme” of the Réseau Asie-IMASIE (Asia-IMASIE Network).
She has curated several exhibitions of nineteenth and early twentieth century photographs and the history of Central Asian archaeology, and co-founded the international Alert Heritage Observatory.