Kate Mitchell was born in California. Soon after, the family moved to New York City, where she began
a lifelong training in dance. After graduation from New York's High School of Performing Arts (now LaGuardia Arts,) she attended Yale University, earning a BA in American Studies. While at Yale, her passion for visual art was kindled by an introductory course in art history. She studied European and American painting, decorative and folk arts, while keeping her hand in the performing arts, as a set builder, stage manager, and choreographer for college productions.

Returning to New York, Ms. Mitchell performed with a number of modern dance companies, including CoDanceCo, at that time a New York City-based repertory company, and appeared in early works by Mark Morris, Bill T. Jones, Ohad Naharin, Doug Varone and other New York choreographers. At the same time, she studied life drawing, fashion drawing and history, and millinery at Parsons School of Design in New York and Paris, and later Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. While in Los Angeles, Ms. Mitchell obtained an MA in Dance at UCLA. When her husband's career required a move to St. Louis, she embarked on a ten-year career as an interior designer, completing projects in St. Louis, Northern and Southern California, New York, and Houston.

The family moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1998, and Ms. Mitchell began to interweave her twin passions for dance and design. After creating solo performance and design installations, she founded Kate Mitchell and Dancers and premiered "Threads" (2004,) "Chocolate Box" (2005,) and "Spirit House" (2007) in San Francisco. In these works, highly detailed costume and set designs amplified the concepts embedded in the choreography.

More recently, Ms. Mitchell has focused on creating collage, couture and wearable assemblages, whose intricacies can be viewed closely. She presented "Carnival" in 2009 and a new group of collages under the aegis of Oakland's East Bay Open Studios in 2010. That same year, SF Weekly named her one of its annual "Masterminds." Ms. Mitchell's work continues to evolve, as she explores different facets of the particular kaleidoscope which is her palette.