Katy Kidd as a youth, was raised in an art-collecting family in the seventies and eighties in Denver, where she studied art in the public schools, at the University of Denver’s Youth Art Program and at the Art Students League of Denver. In 1995 she graduated with a BA from Evergreen State College and that summer studied at Anderson Ranch Arts Center. Since the mid-nineties, Kidd lived in Santa Fe and studied fine-art restoration with Andolsek Restoration and prehistoric pottery restoration with Schenck Southwest. In 2019 she was awarded a long-awaited MFA from the Double Standard Institute of the Arts.

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A critic has said of Katy Kidd’s work that it juxtaposes “a certain deliberate flatness reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, which play with two- and three-dimensional allusions in Pop Art, with a street-art sensibility as direct as the “Smack” and “Pow!” graphics in a comic book. In Kidd’s paintings, clashing themes of the oppression of women, especially vis a vis religious dogma, and the institutionalized racism and classicism inherent to 21st-century global capitalism, point to the hypocrisy behind cultural systems that tout such ideals as kindness and compassion.” Kidd’s content is both tongue in cheek and deadly serious.

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Kidd’s work is in collections at the Denver and Memphis International Airports, The Lama Foundation, and the US Embassy at Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Her paintings have been shown in California, Washington, New Mexico, Colorado, Wisconsin, Oregon, and Madrid, Spain. In addition to this, her murals and street art have been exhibited in the Harwood Art Museum, Kenya, Uganda, Jamaica, Spain and multiple states in the US.

Since 2021 Katy has lived and worked in the historic Five Points neighborhood in downtown Denver.