Born in Barcelona, Spain, Catya Plate grew up in Köln, Germany, with her Spanish mother and German father. She earned her fine arts degree at the Werkkunstschule Köln and relocated to New York in 1987 through a Fulbright Scholarship to continue her post-graduate studies at the School of Visual Arts. Plate also lived in London for three years and currently resides in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. In 1996 she received an Artist in the Marketplace award from the Bronx Museum of the Arts and in 2008 her work was selected for permanent inclusion in the Art Base of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum.

Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Center for Book Arts, New York, NY; Y Gallery, New York, NY; Robert V. Fullerton Art Museum, San Bernardino, CA; Art Resources Transfer, New York, NY; Galerie Elten & Elten, Zürich, Switzerland and Goethe Institut, New York, NY. Group exhibitions include "Conscious Behind Unconscious" at Gallery Korea, New York, NY; "Urban Legends and Rural Myths" at Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN; "Inner Child: Good and Evil in the Garden of Memories" at the Hunterdon Museum of Art, Clinton, NJ; "String Theory" at Jancar Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; "Dreams & Possibilities" at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, New York, NY and "Free Play" at the Islip Art Museum, East Islip, NY.

Her detailed, bizarrely fascinating mixed media and multimedia work ranges across painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, animated short film and artist books. She harnesses both technology and traditional methods to unconventional, often whimsical and occasionally subversive ends.

Articles and reviews of Plate's exhibition and installation projects have appeared in The New York Times; The New York Sun; NY Arts Magazine; Neue Zürcher Zeitung; The Standard Times; The Independent and LA Weekly. Her art, which addresses life in an increasingly multicultural, multilingual and surreal world, is represented in numerous private and public collections including The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; The Museum of Modern Art Library / Franklin Furnace, New York, NY; New York Public Library, New York, NY; and Museo dei Tarocchi, Bologna, Italy.