Kate Bollinger grew up in Charlottesville, Virginia. Her mother was a music therapist, and her two older brothers played in local bands. As a child, she sang in the Ash Lawn Opera every summer and began writing songs. In 2011, her brother Will recorded a song of hers, and she uploaded it to SoundCloud. From then on, she made primitive home recordings, which she released online and burned to CDs for her friends. In high school, she spent two summers studying songwriting at Young Writers Workshop and played her first show opening for her former songwriting teacher, Gene Osborne. Serendipitously, the other act on the bill was her all-time favorite band, Philly-based, The Extraordinaires. They kept in touch, and she went to Philadelphia the following year to record her first EP, Key West, with The Extraordinaires as her backing band. By college, while studying poetry and cinematography, she continued to self-release folk-pop songs to the attention of The New York Times and NPR. After years of playing and recording in solitude, Bollinger formed a band to record her EP, I Don't Wanna Lose, followed by the 2020 EP, A word becomes a sound. She made her Ghostly International debut in 2022 with Look at it in the Light, a six-song collection that saw her building out the project's sound and visual scope, including a series of collaborative music videos. Since moving to Los Angeles, Bollinger has split time between recording new material, contributing to friends' projects (Drugdealer, Paul Cherry), touring (with Faye Webster, Tennis, Devendra Banhart, and others), directing music videos (for Jessica Pratt and her own), and releasing several standalone singles including "You At Home," a collaboration with Dave Longstreth of Dirty Projectors.

Bollinger’s full-length debut arrives in late summer 2024 on Ghostly International. Written during a period of transience and change, Songs From A Thousand Frames Of Mind was made to resemble a mixtape — something carefully crafted and delivered from just one person to another. Here, Bollinger and her band favor the eclectic, melodic, and majestic, supporting intimate, stream-of-consciousness lyricism with classic instrumentation inspired by touchstones of 1960s folk-pop and 1990s indie rock.