On television, she acted in the HBO miniseries Olive Kitteridge (2014), for which she was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited Series or Movie.

[7] After her film debut in 2003 as Samantha in Swordswallowers and Thin Men, Kazan had her first professional stage role in the 2006 off-Broadway revival of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, starring Cynthia Nixon.

That fall, she returned to the stage in a The New Group production of 100 Saints You Should Know for which she received a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play nomination.

[8] That same year she acted in Jonathan Marc Sherman's Things We Want alongside Paul Dano and Peter Dinklage directed by Ethan Hawke.

[9] In January 2008, Kazan made her Broadway debut opposite S. Epatha Merkerson and Kevin Anderson in a revival of William Inge's Come Back, Little Sheba.

"[11] In the fall, she appeared on stage as Masha in a Broadway revival of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull (2008) opposite Kristin Scott Thomas, Carey Mulligan, and Peter Sarsgaard.

[14] She ended the year playing Meryl Streep's daughter in the Nancy Meyers romantic comedy It's Complicated also starring Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin.

She also starred as Millie Gately in Kelly Reichardt's independent Western drama Meek's Cutoff (2010) acting alongside Michelle Williams and Paul Dano.

[15] On the small screen, she appeared in four episodes of HBO's Bored to Death as Nina, the love interest of a fictionalized Jonathan Ames, played by Jason Schwartzman.

Her play We Live Here, about a dysfunctional family, received its world premiere production from October 12 to November 6, 2011, at the off-Broadway Manhattan Theater Club in New York City.

That same year Kazan starred in Joel and Ethan Coen's Western anthology film, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, in the vignette "The Gal Who Got Rattled".

[citation needed] In 2020, Kazan starred in the limited series The Plot Against America as Elizabeth "Bess" Levin, a version of the mother of author Philip Roth, on whose book the show was based.

[26] The following year she starred in the drama film She Said portraying journalist Jodi Kantor acting opposite Carey Mulligan as Megan Twohey.

Dalton Ross of Entertainment Weekly wrote of her performance, "Kazan deftly manages to convey Sister James' struggle between innocent naivety and the loss of inner light that comes with considering ugly possible truths".