Litchinitser was born in Russia. She earned her undergraduate degree in physics at the Moscow State University. She moved to the United States for her graduate studies and she joined the Illinois Institute of Technology. Her doctoral research considered Fiber Bragg grating filters for the compensation of dispersion. In 1997 Litchinitser joined the Institute of Optics in Rochester, New York, where she was made a postdoctoral research fellow. She joined Bell Labs at the same time that the field of metamaterials was emerging, and switched her focus on the theoretical properties of metamaterials that manipulate the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. In 2005 Litchinitser moved to the University of Michigan.