Cate Mireille Bottiglione was born in Washington, D.C., raised in Fort Washington, Maryland, and went to high school in Northern Virginia. Her father was a pediatrician, and her mother worked in the museums of the nation's capital. She is of Italian, Albanian, and Finnish descent. She moved to New York City to pursue acting after college. She holds a B.A. in Theatre with a Minor in Communications from The Catholic University of America- training under professors from the Yale School of Drama and the Moscow Vakhtangov Theater. She has a certificate from the British American Drama Academy, Oxford, England. After over a decade of teaching acting to kids, she did 2 years of intensive Meisner Technique in Sanford Meisner's original classroom. She lives in NYC with her husband and son.