In 1976 she graduated from the correspondence department of the theater studies faculty of LGITMiK (L. Gitelman's workshop). She worked as an assistant director and second director at Lenfilm Studios. In 1981 she received a diploma from the directing department of the Higher Courses for Scriptwriters and Directors (Yuri Karasik's workshop). She worked as a director at Lenfilm Studios. She lives in Moscow. Svetlana Proskurina made her film debut back in 1982 with the short film "Parents' Day," and in 1987 she made her first full-length fiction film, "The Children's Playground." A breakthrough in the director's career came in 1989, when her second fiction film, "A Random Waltz," won the main competition at the Locarno International Film Festival, bringing Russian cinema its first-ever Golden Leopard award. Critics noted a certain influence in the film of Svetlana's teacher, film director Ilya Averbakh (the same interest in fractured female characters) and in destinies, while at the same time emphasizing Proskurina's different attitude toward dramaturgy, her "brave and harsh authorial willfulness." In this film Svetlana Proskurina dared to break with narrative form, focusing on the visual and sound aspects of the work.

The narrative laws of screen dramaturgy were subjected to an even more radical rethinking in Proskurina's next work, "Reflection in the Mirror" (1992), in which she attempted to recreate the psychological world of the hero on screen through the means of film language. The film participated in the prestigious Directors' Fortnight program in Cannes and marked the end of the first stage of the director's creative biography. Over the following 10 years she did not make a single fiction film and devoted herself to documentary cinema, shooting at Bereg Studios for the Kultura channel films about other artists — Ernst Neizvestny, Mikhail Shemyakin, Mikhail Pugovkin, Alexander Sokurov. In 2001 Svetlana Proskurina returned to major fiction cinema and, with private producers, began preparations for the shooting of the film "Remote Access." Alas, the project stalled at the initial stage, but later, thanks to director Alexander Sokurov and producer Yuri Obukhov, in 2004 the film was nevertheless completed.