Nagaeva was born in Tashkent into the family of architect Sadyk Nagaev, a Crimean Tatar, who moved to Uzbekistan in 1938. She graduated from the Department of Architecture of Tashkent Polytechnic Institute in 1972. In 1988, she defended her doctoral dissertation, devoted to public services infrastructure in mid-size cities of Uzbekistan, at Moscow Central Research and Design Institute (ZNIIP) of the Ministry of Construction; in 1998 she received her secondary doctorate for further research on public services infrastructure in Uzbekistan. 

Between 1972 and 1999 Nagaeva worked at Uzbek Scientific-Research and Design Institute of Urban Planning, simultaneously teaching architecture at Tashkent Polytechnic Institute (today Tashkent Institute of Architecture and Construction). She designed a public and administration center in Khiva (1970) and theaters in Urgench (1973) and Kokand (1983), as well as the sanatorium of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Uzbekistan in Tashkent district (1998). 

In 2000, Nagaeva moved to Crimea, where she had designed projects since 1991, including masterplans for microdistricts in Simferopol and in Yevpatoriya. She taught fine and applied arts at Crimea University of Engineering and Pedagogy, and became the director of the Crimea branch of the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture of Ukraine. Between 2008 and 2014 she led the chair of architectural design and urban planning at National Academy of Nature Preservation and Resort Planning, becoming a professor in 2011. Since 2015, Nagaeva has held the chair of urbanism at the newly-created V. I. Vernadsky Crimea Federal University.

She has been a member of the Ukrainian Academy of Engineering since 2004. In 2005, she was awarded the Taras Shevchenko prize for the Renaissance sculpture complex at Crimea University of Engineering and Pedagogy (with A. Aliyev, A. Abdullayev and F. Yakubov) in Simferopol, devoted to the return of Crimea Tatars to the peninsula after their deportation in 1944.