Kathrin Kemp was born in Graz in 1988. She graduated from the Ortwein School of Art and Design where she had studied in the Product Design and Presentation Department. She further studied Stage and Film Design at Mozarteum, Salzburg, and the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, with Bernhard Kleber, where she has been lecturing since 2015. She assisted productions at Burgtheater, Vienna, at Theater Basel and at Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf. Kathrin Kemp designed the set for Dido and Aeneas at Studio Bühne Wien, in collaboration with Simon Sramek and Dominique Wiesbauer, directed by Béatrice Lachaussée, as well as the production design for Erdbeerland by Florian Pochlatko, awarded with the Austrian Film Award. She also worked as an assistant to the technical management at Theater in der Josefstadt. 

She created the stage design for Mateja Koležnik's production of Der Einsame Weg in collaboration with Raimund Orfeo Voigt at Theater an der Josefstadt and designed the set for demut vor deinen taten baby, directed by Florian Thiel. In 2019, she collaborated with Bernhard Hammer on the draft and artistic conception of the large-scale theater project De Opstand. In addition, Kathrin Kemp designed window displays and sets for, among others, the fashion label Hermés and the herbal liqueur brand Kalê. In 2020, the production of Friedrich Schiller's Kabale und Liebe, directed by Thomas Oliver Niehaus, led her to Stadttheater Bremerhaven, where she developed both the stage design and the costume design. Kemp created the set design for Dai Fujikura's Solaris and collaborated with the director Helen Malkowsky in a production for Neue Oper Wien. Since 2021, Kathrin Kemp also works as a designer at the Technical Museum in Vienna.