Brooke Baldwin was born in Atlanta and attended The Westminster Schools, a private college-preparatory school. She then attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and also studied at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. In 2001, she began her career at WVIR in Charlottesville, Virginia. She later anchored mornings at WOWK in West Virginia before becoming lead reporter at WTTG in Washington, D.C.

Baldwin joined CNN in 2008, and in 2011 she co-anchored coverage of the final space shuttle launch. She moved to New York in 2014 to anchor CNN Newsroom with Brooke Baldwin on weekday afternoons. In 2015, she hosted a gun violence town hall. Her 2017 series American Woman profiled women such as Sheryl Crow and Ava DuVernay.

In February 2021, Baldwin announced she was leaving CNN, and she hosted her final show on April 16. Her first book, Huddle: How Women Unlock Their Collective Power, came out that same month. It features interviews with women including Gloria Steinem and Stacey Abrams. In January 2024, she began hosting the Netflix reality series The Trust: A Game of Greed.