Jankowicz double-majored in Russian and political science at Bryn Mawr College. In 2010, she spent a semester at Russia's Herzen State Pedagogical University and graduated in 2011.
In 2017, she was a Fulbright fellow in Kyiv, working for Ukraine's foreign ministry. She worked as a disinformation fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center and as the National Democratic Institute's Russia and Belarus program supervisor.