Dia Mirza was born in Hyderabad, India. Her father, Frank Handrich, was a German interior designer from Munich and her mother is Deepa, a Bengali Indian. They separated when she was six years old. Her father died when she was nine and her mother remarried Ahmed Mirza who died in 2004. She retained a Muslim surname (Mirza) from her stepfather, though she herself is a Hindu. Later she adopted the last name of her birth-father and became Dia Mirza Handrich.
She stated that she suffered from "low self-esteem" as a child. When living in Khairatabad, Hyderabad, she attended Vidyaranya High School For Boys And Girls, a school based on the teachings of Jiddu Krishnamurti, and later Nasr School, in Kushnuma.
Currently, she lives in Bandra, Mumbai. To brush up on acting before Shootout at Lokhandwala, she took a one week course of Film at New York University.
