Katrin Mensing grew up in the western part of Germany. She studied Chinese and Japanese Language & Art History at the universities of Göttingen and Munich. After receiving her M.A. in 1993 at Ludwig Maximilian Universität of Munich, she pursued studies of Korean Language at Seoul National University. From 1994-2004, Katrin lived in Seoul and Daejeon in South Korea. During this time, she studied German as a foreign language at the Goethe Institut and also started teaching DaF at the Goethe Institut and at Paichai University in Daejeon. In 2004 she left South Korea and moved to Mexico City where she kept on teaching DaF at Universidad Anahuac.
In 2016, Katrin returned to Germany after 22 years of absence and is now living in Berlin.