Her father, Sir Frederic Kenyon, was Director of the British Museum. Kathleen Kenyon was the graduate of Somerville College, Oxford, and was the number 1 woman to turn into president of the Oxford Archaeological Society. Charted her graduation around 1929, she worked with Gertrude Caton–Thomson on the excavation of Great Zimbabwe, and afterward went to operate for leading archeologist, Sir Mortimer Wheeler.

Between 1936 & 1939 she excavated a Jewry Wall site in Leicester.

When World War II she co-founded the University of London Institute of Archaeology, and worked in excavations at Sutton Walls, Sabratha, and more major web sites, yet becoming Honorary Director of the British School of Archaeology within Jerusalem. Her work on Jericho helped date a occupation of the mound Natufian culture at the end of the go Ice Age (10,000 – 9,000 BC). She besides excavated within Jerusalem, sustaining comparatively little profits. Inside 1962, she became principal of St Hugh’s College, Oxford. inside her retirement in 1973, she was created a DBE (Dame of the Order of the British Empire).