Her legal name (birth name) is Tanya Mercado. Her family moved to Jackson Township, New Jersey when she was five years old. At age 19 she began dancing in strip clubs on the Jersey Shore in Asbury Park. From there she moved to nude modeling for magazine layouts.
Her exotic half Hispanic/half Italian look proved to be quite popular with photographers, and she was offered some work in all-girl porn videos. She accepted, and eventually broke into mainstream adult-films, where she is still going strong.

Gina got her first breast job in 1995, moving from a B-cup to a C-cup with the help of saline implants. In 1999, Gina appeared in her first adult film, Eighteen in Vegas. Lynn also made an appearance in Eminem's "Superman" music video, and was an extra in the movie Analyze That.
Gina has been married since 1999 to Travis Knight, a fellow porn star.
In 2006, she was featured in the Bill Zebub film Assmonster: The Making of a Horror Movie.

She was featured in famous Gina Lynn And Belladonna Unleashed.

When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?
A veterinarian. Then I wanted to be a toll person. I thought they had the easiest job and great benefits. In my senior year at Catholic highschool, I was dancing the last six months [as soon as she turned 18] at a strip club. Then I went to six months of community college [and quit] for the easy money.

I lost my virginity to my boyfriend in eighth grade. I was 14. I was stripping in New Jersey. In 1994, I saw this club, Al's Cabaret in Pennsylvania, on TV. I went and auditioned there. I thought that if it made TV it must be a great place. That's when I first started seeing all the features and the porn stars. The first feature act I saw was Blondage. I was a house girl. A lot of them features gave me numbers for magazines.

How did you like working on Analyze That?
I was Billy Crystal and Robert De Niro for eight hours doing the bar scene over and over again. They were nice to me and very respectful. There were a lot of girls there. I made the number one cut. You don't know how much they're going to use. I was cast as an extra. They showed me for a good 30-seconds. My full body and everything. They used me in promotion for the movie.