Svetlana Nesterova was born in Yekaterinburg. Between 1995 and 2000 she studied at the composition faculty of the St. Petersburg State Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatoire (class of B. Tishchenko). The same time she worked as a concert master at the faculty of stage movement at the Academy of Theatre Art. In 2002 she completed post-graduate studying at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire. She has taken part in the festivals ''Musical Spring'', ''Sound Ways'' and ''From the Avant-garde to the Present Day''. In 1999 she received the grant ''Muses of Petersburg'' in the category ''Music''. Svetlana Nesterova performed music by contemporary Petersburg composers in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Yekaterinburg, Kaliningrad and Vitebsk. Together with a student delegation from the St. Petersburg Conservatoire, she took part in concerts in Moscow and Boston (USA).

In 2005 she was a prize-winner at the All-Russian Mariinsky Theatre Competition, presenting the one-act opera Lawsuit based on a subject by Nikolai Gogol’s tale, presented by the theatre for the first time during a festival run for to mark two centuries since the composer’s birth (directed by V. Gergiev, conducted by M. Tatarnikov).

In 2007 she won the first prize at the All-Russian Andrey Petrov Competition for her violin fantasy In the World of High Technology.

Together with Vyacheslav Kruglik she composed the choreographic quest Magic Ring, which was awarded a prize at the Bolshoi Theatre and the Union of Theatre Worker’s competition to create an operatic and choreographic work for children and young people (2008). Moreover, Svetlana Nesterova is the composer of the opera Grandad, the choreographic quest Magic Ring (together with V. Kruglik), the operette Blue Crone’s Spring, the children’s musical tale How the Letters Sang and Children Learned to Read and concerti for various instrumental ensembles, piano sonatas and vocal cycles. Since 2002 she has been working at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire