Vera Farmiga was born second of seven children on August 6, 1973, in Passaic County, New Jersey, USA. She did not speak English until the age of six, and was raised in a strict Ukrainian Catholic home of her father, Michael (Mykola) Farmiga, and her mother, Lyubov (Lyuba) Farmiga. She attended a Ukrainian Catholic school, then went to public school, and was a shy nearsighted girl wearing spectacles while practicing her piano, and was switching to contact lenses for dancing. Farmiga was touring with a Ukrainian folk-dancing company in her teens.

In 1991, she graduated from Hunderton Central regional high school and initially dreamed of becoming an optometrist, but eventually changed her mind, and studied acting at Syracuse University's School of Performing Arts. She began her professional acting career in 1996, making her Broadway debut as an understudy in the play 'Taking Sides'. Her stage credits included performances in 'The Tempest', 'The Glass Menagerie', 'Hamlet', and in a well-reviewed Off-Broadway production 'Second-Hand Smoke' (1997). At the same time she made her television debut as a female lead, Catlin, opposite then unknown Heath Ledger in Fox's adventure series "Roar" (1997).

In 1998, Farmiga made her big screen debut in the drama Return to Paradise (1998), then played daughters of Christopher Walken in The Opportunists (2000) and Richard Gere in Autumn in New York (2000). She starred as a working class mother struggling to keep her life and marriage together while hiding her drug addiction in Down to the Bone (2004), for which she won Best Actress Awards from the 2004 Sundance Film Festival and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. Farmiga's acting talent shone in a range of characters, from her memorable role as the senator's daughter opposite John Voihgt in The Manchurian Candidate (2004), to a mental patient in an insane asylum in Neverwas (2005). She co-stars as the wife of a mobster opposite Paul Walker in Running Scared (2006), as a humorous prostitute in Breaking and Entering (2006), and as a doctor in The Departed (2006).

Farmiga was formerly married to a fellow actor Sebastian Roché, whom she met during her work on the series 'Roar', and the two eloped to the Bahamas after the series end in 1997. Their marriage ended in divorce in 2005. She shares time between her residencies in New Jersey and in Los Angeles, California. Her activities outside her acting profession include reading, playing her piano, and spending time with her pet angora goats, an obsession she had since she was a child.