[1][2] She studied under and worked for several significant modernists of her day, including Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe, and Carl Koch.
[2] She attended Wright Junior College and then transferred to the University of Wisconsin-Madison when her family temporarily moved to Wisconsin.
[1][2] Kerbis was inspired to pursue architecture after reading an article on Frank Lloyd Wright and then visiting Taliesin East.
[1][2][4] Kerbis moved back to Chicago to study architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, receiving her master's degree in 1954.
[2] They divorced a short while after, and she later remarried tennis professional Donald Kerbis, who had a daughter named Lisa from a previous marriage.
Kerbis intentionally focused on structure and chose not to be concerned with furniture or finishes in order to establish herself as a woman architect, not an interior designer.