Zara Jabeen Chowdhury was born on 8 March 1976 in the village of
Monakosha in
Nawabganj,
Rajshahi district,
Bangladesh. She belongs to an aristocratic
Bengali family of
Muslim Chowdhuries who served as the former
Zamindars of Monakosha. Her grandfather,
Murtaza Raza Choudhry, was a former Finance Minister of
East Pakistan and a member of the 1st
National Assembly of Pakistan. Her great-great-grandfather, Ismail Hossain Choudhry, was the
zamindar of
Kotalpukur in
Bihar. She is the niece of former Chief Justice
Mainur Reza Chowdhury. She studied at the
Assumption University in
Bangkok in 1995 and graduated from the
North South University with a
Bachelor of Business Administration in Marketing and International Business Management in 1998. She received her
Master of Business Administration from the
Haas School of Business under
California University Berkeley in 2008. ==Career==