Megan Ward was born on September 24, 1969, in Los Angeles, California, and is the youngest of four siblings. Her parents were both professional actors and acting coaches, which influenced her early interest in acting.

When she was four years old, her family moved to Honolulu, Hawaii, where she began doing commercials for local department stores at the age of nine. In her early teens, she went to Japan for modeling jobs and stayed for several years, even hosting a Japanese television show called Science Q.

After graduating from Kaiser High School, she moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career.

Megan Ward is best known for her numerous credits in science fiction and horror movies and television series. She secured roles in science-fiction and comedy movies, including leading roles in Charles Band's classics Crash and Burn, Trancers II and Trancers III, and the 1993 horror/comedy Freaked.

She is also well known for playing Robyn Sweeney, the teen crush of Dave (played by Sean Astin), in the 1992 comedy Encino Man. In the mid-1990s, she had a recurring role on the show Party of Five and later took the lead role in the Cold War UFO thriller-series Dark Skies.

Since the cancellation of Dark Skies, she has appeared in mainly direct-to-video films and TV series such as Summerland, Sports Night, Kevin Hill, and Boomtown. She later debuted as Kate Howard on General Hospital in 2007 and made a special guest appearance on the show in 2018.

In her personal life, Megan Ward married Michael Shore in 1995, whom she met in acting class. They have two children, a son named Oliver (born in 2001) and a daughter named Audrey (born in 2006).