Anwar was educated at Accrington Moorhead High School, and gained an A level in Theatre in Performance at the Accrington and Rossendale College in 1988 before training at the Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts in London.
She played Police Constable Maggie Habib in the situation comedy The Thin Blue Line which was shown on BBC 1 from 1995 through 1996.
She has also starred in The Infidel as the woman in the black burqa. She also plays Trudy Rehmann in the popular Nickelodeon series House of Anubis. Recently she has appeared in a number of in BBC dramas and sitcoms, such as The Wright Way in which she plays the only female health and safety officer, Malika Maha. and in an episode of Upstart Crow where she portrayed one of the three witches from Macbeth. She also appeared in the 2014 dramas Happy Valley and In the Club and the ghost tale Remember Me. In 2014 she portrayed Lauren in The Beneficiary, episode 5 of season six of the BBC's series of 45-minute stand-alone dramas Moving On.
Mina also appeared in Series 10 of Doctor Who in 2017.
In 2018, Mina appeared as Miss Marigold Mould in Series 2 of The Worst Witch
