[2][3] Her father is the executive chairman of Commerce Bancshares, a bank holding company founded by the Kemper family.

[9][10] The backlash prompted Kemper to release a statement denouncing white supremacy and apologizing for participating in the event.

[14] As a freshman, she played on Princeton's 1998 national championship field hockey team,[15] maintaining she sat on the bench "roughly 97 percent" of the time,[16] before moving on the following year to focus on theater.

[22] Kemper earned her Screen Actors Guild card doing commercial advertising of a one-week sale of tents at Kmart.

She has appeared in several shows for the Brigade, including Death and/or Despair, Listen Kid, Gang Bang and The Improvised Mystery.

[34] In August 2008, she auditioned for a spot on the NBC sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live, but was not cast.

In March 2008, she wrote and performed in the one-woman show "Dumb Girls" through the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre.

The character was originally written to be more sarcastic and dry, but the writers changed her to be more perky and optimistic to more closely resemble Kemper herself.

[16] Although the character was originally intended for four episodes, the producers were impressed with Kemper and signed her as a regular in the sixth season.

Alan Sepinwall, television columnist with The Star-Ledger, praised the "infectious joy and sweetness" she brought to the show.

"[42] Andy Shaw of TV Fodder said she "adds some freshness to the cast"[43] and Josh McAuliffe of The Times-Tribune in Scranton, Pennsylvania, said he liked Erin's "cheerful, appealingly goofy personality".

[45][46][47][48][49][50] In October 2009, Kemper appeared in Subtle Sexuality, a set of three The Office webisodes about efforts by Erin and Kelly Kapoor (Mindy Kaling) to start a girl group.

[2] Following The Office, she starred in the Netflix original comedy series Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt as the fish-out-of-water title character.

She plays a former abductee and forced cult member who wants to shed the victim pity of her small hometown and moves to New York.

In summer 2015, Kemper served as a temporary co-host of Today alongside Al Roker, Natalie Morales, Tamron Hall, and Willie Geist.

[53] In 2019, Kemper appeared as a guest judge on season 14 of America's Got Talent where she pushed the Golden Buzzer for light-up dance group Light Balance Kids.

[61][62] On The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Kemper said that her Jewish husband had agreed to raise their children Roman Catholic.