Kimberlin was born on the Navajo Nation, in Ganado, Apache County, Arizona and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California.
[1] In 1968 she received a Master of Arts degree in ethnomusicology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), writing her thesis on the subject of contemporary Ethiopian popular songs.
While there, her instructors included Mantle Hood, Klaus Wachsmann, Charles Seeger, David Morton, Tsun-yuen Lui, Nicolas Slonimsky, and Paul Chihara.
In 1972 she returned to Ethiopia for more extensive fieldwork, recording a total of 97 reel-to-reel tapes of music performed by musicians from Shewa, Wollo, Begemder, Gojjam, Tigray, Eritrea, Welega, and Gamu-Gofa, in Addis Ababa, Harar, and Jijiga.
Kimberlin has presented papers at numerous music conferences in the United States, Europe, Nigeria, Japan, and China, including many symposia organized by the ethnomusicologist and composer Akin Euba, whose opera Chaka has been released on CD by MRI Press.