Ingraham was born to Gordon Ingraham and Elizabeth Wright Ingraham. Ingraham was raised in Colorado and earned her doctorate at Johns Hopkins University. Ingraham has held academic appointments at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Iowa State University and been a visiting professor at Princeton, the GSD, and Columbia University, before joining Pratt as chair in 1999.^[2]

She is married, with one son, and is one of eight great-granddaughters of Frank Lloyd Wright.^[3]

Ingraham is the author of Architecture, Animal, Human: The Asymmetrical Condition (Routledge 2006), Architecture and the Burdens of Linearity (Yale University Press 1998),^[4] and Architecture’s Theory (MIT Press 2023). She was co-editor of Restructuring Architectural Theory (Northwestern University Press 1986). From 1991 to 1998, Ingraham was an editor, with Michael Hays and Alicia Kennedy, of Assemblage: A Critical Journal of Architecture and Design Culture. Dr. Ingraham has published extensively in academic journals and book collections and lectured at architecture schools nationally and internationally. Throughout her career, she has organized and participated in symposia that advance serious discussions about architecture; in February 2008, she ran a conference at Columbia University on animate life and form entitled "Part Animal."

In 2001, Ingraham was the winner, with architect Laurie Hawkinson, of a design competition and building commission for the Museum of Women's History in New York.