By age 15, she was a teen model working in Japan. Fluent in Japanese, she landed her first screen role in "Basho's Journey" and played a recurring role on a Japanese TV series. Flush with this success, she decided to return to the US mainland and try her hand at acting. The attractive redhead hit the ground running. In TV, she went from doing episodes of "Sons & Daughters" and "Charles in Charge" to a regular slot in the short-lived 1993 Fox series "Class of '96", in which she was Patty, the slightly dreamy/naive coed. After the demise of that series, Ward was in "Winnetka Road" (NBC, 1994) which also flopped. But that network kept her name on file, so-to-speak, and in 1996, she was starring with Eric Close in "Dark Skies", about a young couple on the run from aliens who pass through the events of the 60s. Ward also co-starred as Ashley Judd in the NBC TV-movie, "Naomi & Wynonna: Love Can Build a Bridge".
Ward has appeared in numerous feature films, albeit most of the low budget variety. She broke in with "Crash and Burn" (1990). She was the mental patient Alice Stillwell in "Trancers II: The Return of Jack Deth" (1991), a role she encored in "Trancers III" the following year. Ward was the object of Sean Astin's desire in "Encino Man" (1992) and the object of Peter Brady's voice-changing desire in "The Brady Bunch Movie" (1995). In 1996, she co-starred with Jerry O'Connell in the MTV-inspired comedy "Joe's Apartment".