She is the eldest daughter of Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia (born 1936), a member of the House of Karađorđević, and her first husband Howard Oxenberg (1919–2010), a Jewish[1] dress manufacturer and close friend of the Kennedy family.

[2] Oxenberg was educated at the Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle in Kensington, London, St. Paul's School, and Columbia University, though she did not finish college.

In 1984, Oxenberg joined the hit ABC prime time soap opera Dynasty—then at its height of popularity[6]—in the role of Amanda Carrington.

[11][12] In 2019, Catherine Oxenberg produced and narrated Escaping the NXIVM Cult: A Mother's Fight to Save Her Daughter in which Andrea Roth portrayed her.

[15] In August 2018, Oxenberg's book Captive: A Mother's Crusade to Save Her Daughter from a Terrifying Cult co-written by former People magazine writer Natasha Stoynoff[16] was published.

[18] Oxenberg also appears in Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult a documentary series for Starz, directed by Cecilia Peck and Inbal B. Lessner, which features India speaking out about her experiences for the first time.

[21][22] Oxenberg met the actor Casper Van Dien during the filming of the 1999 TV movie The Collectors, and they worked together again the same year in the Evangelical Christian thriller The Omega Code.

[29] Through her maternal grandfather, Prince Paul of Yugoslavia of the House of Karađorđević, Catherine Oxenberg is a great-great-great-granddaughter of Karađorđe, who started the First Serbian Uprising against the Ottoman Empire in 1804.

Her maternal grandmother, Princess Olga, was the daughter of Grand Duchess Elena Vladimirovna of Russia and Prince Nicholas of Greece and Denmark, himself the son of another Romanov grand duchess, Queen Olga Konstantinovna of the Hellenes and her Danish-born husband King George of Greece, brother of Queen Alexandra of the United Kingdom and the Empress Maria Fyodorovna.