Kelsang Wangmo was born in Germany near Cologne, where she grew up and went to school. After graduating from high school, she decided to take a gap year and travel before starting college. She spent some time in Israel, worked for six months in Japan, traveled for a few months in Southeast Asia, and finally went to India, where she took a Buddhist course in Dharamsala and became a Buddhist nun ten months later. She did some meditation retreats and then enrolled in the traditional Geshe curriculum at the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics (IBD), receiving the Geshe degree in 2011.

In 2004 she began teaching Buddhist philosophy classes in English, following the IBD curriculum. During this time she mainly taught Collected Topics, Lorig, Tenets, Pharchin based on Maitreya’s Ornament for Clear Realizations, and the second chapter of Dharmakirti’s Pramanavarttika. From 2006 to 2016, she taught Buddhist philosophy to Emory University students as part of the spring semester of Emory’s Tibetan Study Abroad Program.

Since 2016, she has worked as an interpreter for His Holiness the Dalai Lama, orally translating His Holiness’ teachings into German. She has also worked for many years as an English interpreter for Kyabje Ling Rinpoche, Kyabje Jhado Rinpoche, Yangden Rinpoche, and other Lamas and Geshes, and is currently working on the German translation of the four volumes on Science and Philosophy of the Indian Buddhist Classics.