Johnson was born as Creola Katherine Coleman on August 26, 1918, in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, to Joylette Roberta and Joshua McKinley Coleman. She had four brothers and she was the youngest. Katherine mastered a lot of math and then came to work at NASA in several projects.

Carreer: She has worked as a computer, has been reassigned to the control and guidance division of the flight research division. However, Katherine and the other women in the computing division were known as '' Color Computers '' and subjected to secretion, working, eating and using toilets separate from their white colleagues. From 1958 until her retirement in 1986, she worked as an aerospace technician, where she calculated the trajectory of several flights, one of the main ones being the Apollo 11. After, Katherine worked with digital computers, her skill and reputation for accuracy in calculations gave her colleagues confidence to work with the new technology. Katherine Jonhson was portrayed in the movie Stars beyond time (2016).