Born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, Kate Sutton studied Art History and Comparative Literature at Stanford University, taking time off for a sojourn in Siberia. After graduation, Kate returned to Russia, settling into St. Petersburg’s legendary Pushkinskaya-10 Art Commune, where she spent several years building up an archive of the former squat’s remarkable residents.

In 2006, she enlisted in the inaugural class of the Master’s program at the San Francisco Art Institute, studying with Okwui Enwezor, Hou Hanru, and Barbara Vanderlinden. After completing this degree, she relocated briefly to Helsinki, Finland, before moving to Moscow in September 2008 to help Maria Baibakova found the non-profit Baibakov Art Projects.

As Associate Curator, she helped bring artists like Paul Pfeiffer, Cyprien Gaillard, Latifa Echakhch, Wade Guyton, and Luc Tuymans to Moscow, while also showcasing Russian artists including Ira Korina, Olga Chernysheva, and Valery Chtak. Kate was responsible for the Baibakov Art Projects blog, where she posted on both the international and Russian art scene up until May 2014. As of 2014, Kate has been based in Zagreb, Croatia.

Kate was a regular contributor to artforum.com for over fifteen years. From 2018 until October 2023, she served as the commissioning editor of international reviews at Artforum and an Associate Editor at the magazine. In recent years, she has also written pieces for ArtChronika, ArtReview, Art Basel Miami Beach Magazine, Bidoun, Billboard, Cultured, Cura, Frieze, Ibraaz, The Hollywood Reporter, LEAP, Memo Review, and Near East, among others. She has penned catalogue essays for artists including Monica Bonvicini, Aslı Çavuşoğlu, Monster Chetwynd, Werner Feiersinger, Dorian Gaudin, Nilbar Güreş, Basim Magdy,  Martin Roth, Stefan Sava, and Emiljia Škarnulytė.

​In 2013, Kate received an Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation. In summer 2014, she was a participant in the 1st Mobile Biennale. In 2015, she was a jury member for the Young Painter’s Prize, based in Vilnius, Lithuania, and in 2016, she served as a member of the Expert Committee for Russia’s National Center for Contemporary Art’s Innovation Prize. In September 2016, she curated the Talks Program, “Public Image,” at the ViennaContemporary, followed up in September 2017 with the program “Borderline.” Additionally, she has prepared a series of lectures called “The State We’re In,” developed in collaboration with the Zagreb-based curatorial collective WHW. For 2019-2020, she served as a resident professor of the WHW Akademija, co-teaching a course with the artist David Maljković.

In 2024, Kate returned as a resident professor for WHW Akademija, while also heading up publications and communications for the Croatian Pavilion for the 60th Venice Biennale. She is currently serving as managing editor for the catalogue raisonné of Sanja Iveković, while working as an editor for the Sharjah Art Foundation.