Kathy Hodge was born in a neighborhood of Providence, RI called Washington Park. At the age of 14 she took up her parents' oil paints, put aside after they graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and started their family of seven children. She also attended RISD and majored in painting. After 2 years she found it necessary to leave school to work in an art supply store for a year to finance her further education. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting from Swain School of Design in New Bedford, MA in 1980.

After graduating she returned to Providence, where she was inspired by the drama and light effects of the industrial waterfront and the power of the huge ships which docked there. She was also attracted to the massive earth moving project of the river relocation in downtown Providence. The work she produced on these themes was exhibited in three one-person shows in 1991 and 1992 and featured in the Sunday Magazine of the Providence Journal.

Her style underwent a transformation after a short trip to Europe in 1990. It was her first series of work inspired by travel. She produced a body of work using a more somber tone and new imagery: the dark Irish Sea, an ancient church in Killarney and the cagelike ascent of the Eiffel Tower.

After her trip she moved to Bristol, RI and her work was further influenced by the stark organic forms of the salt marshes and the natural landscape which surrounded her home on the bay. She was also climbing and painting the White Mountains in New Hampshire.

Hodge has been appointed artist-in-residence six times by the National Parks Service. In 1993 she worked from a historic cabin in Rocky Mountain National Park. In 1997 she was invited to live and work for two weeks in the Cape Cod National Seashore, continuing the tradition of artists who found inspiration and escape in the primitive shacks in the Provinceland dunes.

In 1998 she worked in Acadia National Park in Maine, and in 1999 she was taken by boat to the solitude of a cabin on Sand Island in the Apostle Island National Lakeshore, 3 miles offshore on Lake Superior. Her most recent residency, in 2000, was at Glacier National Park in Montana. This year, she is spending a month in Badlands Natonal Park in Montana.

In addition to painting the natural world, she has also produced a series of paintings of 14 churches. The series explored the unique architecture of churches, using examples from Providence to Newport. In the antique stores which surrounded her home she discovered dusty and broken ornate frames from the early 1900s, which relinquished ancestral portraits and religious prints, and now surround and enrich the church paintings.

Her current studio is in East Providence, RI where she produced a series of paintings of her impressions of 10 days she spent in St. Petersburg and Moscow, which she exhibited in a one person show, "10 Days in Russia", in February of 2002. This group was exhibited in a one person show at the Bert Gallery in Providence in February of 2002. A series of paintings taking inspiration from the view out the train window from Providence to New York City was exhibited in March of 2005 at the Bert Gallery.