Cristie Lynn Kerr was born on October 12, 1977, in Miami, Florida. She took up golf at age eight and progressed quickly through the junior ranks in South Florida. In 1994 she won the Junior Orange Bowl International Golf Championship, and in 1995 she captured the Women’s Western Amateur and was named the American Junior Golf Association’s Junior Player of the Year. She attended Miami Sunset High School in West Kendall, Florida, and turned professional in 1996 at age 18, forgoing a college golf career to head straight for the pro ranks.

Kerr earned her LPGA Tour card through Final Qualifying and joined the tour full-time in 1997, one of the youngest players in the field that year. Her first several seasons were a grind: she teed it up in more than 130 LPGA events before finally breaking through for her first victory at the 2002 Longs Drugs Challenge. That win opened the floodgates on a career that would eventually produce 20 LPGA Tour titles.

Kerr went on to win 20 times on the LPGA Tour, including two major championships. Her first major came at the 2007 U.S. Women’s Open at Pine Needles, where she closed with a final-round 68 to win by two strokes and collect a $560,000 winner’s share from the $3.1 million purse. Her second major arrived at the 2010 LPGA Championship, where she shot 19-under-par 269 to win by a record 12 strokes over Song-Hee Kim, earning $337,500 and vaulting from fifth to first in the Women’s World Golf Rankings — a position she held for three weeks that June.

Kerr represented the United States in nine consecutive Solheim Cups from 2002 to 2017, compiling an 18-14-6 record and 21 points, which surpassed Juli Inkster’s mark to become the U.S. career points record at the time. She was part of six winning American teams. Under the LPGA’s career points system for its own Hall of Fame (separate from the World Golf Hall of Fame), Kerr has accumulated 22 of the 27 points required for induction — one point per LPGA win and major awards, two points per major championship — and as of 2026 has not yet reached the threshold. In 2025, competing on the Legends Tour for players 45 and older, Kerr won the LPGA Legends Championship at Copper Rock Golf Club in Hurricane, Utah, her first victory of any kind since 2017.

Kerr’s earnings tracked the normal arc of an LPGA career: modest paychecks in her rookie years, a sharp climb once she started winning regularly in the mid-2000s, and peak seasons around her two major titles. She earned $560,000 for her 2007 U.S. Women’s Open win alone, and her 2010 season — built around the $337,500 LPGA Championship victory and her run to World No. 1 — ranks among her best on tour, with total single-season earnings reported in the $1.5-1.7 million range in some published breakdowns of her tour years. Her earnings tapered in the 2010s as LPGA purses grew league-wide but Kerr’s own win total slowed, before falling further once she shifted into a limited playing schedule and broadcasting work in the late 2010s and 2020s. Exact year-by-year LPGA figures are published by the tour and vary slightly by source depending on whether bonus pool money and team events are included.

Unlike stick-and-ball athletes, professional golfers have no franchise contracts — their primary “contract” income is tournament prize money, which is unusually well documented. Across 602 LPGA Tour events, Kerr’s career prize money total is listed at just over $20.1 million by the LPGA and Wikipedia’s tour-earnings tracking, placing her among a small group of players — alongside Annika Sorenstam, Karrie Webb, and later Lydia Ko — to cross the $20 million mark in LPGA career earnings. Other tallies put the figure closer to $19-19.8 million depending on cutoff date; the gap reflects ongoing Legends Tour and senior-circuit earnings that some trackers count separately from “LPGA Tour” earnings proper.

Kerr built a long run of equipment and apparel endorsements alongside her prize money. She had deals with Callaway Golf for clubs and Lacoste for apparel, and at earlier points in her career carried sponsorships with Titleist/FootJoy and insurance company Mutual of Omaha. Golf Digest’s reporting on LPGA off-course income placed Kerr among the tour’s seven-figure endorsement earners during her prime years in the 2000s, a level reserved for the tour’s most consistent winners and most marketable faces.

Kerr’s most significant venture outside golf is in wine. In 2006 she partnered with Napa Valley’s Pride Mountain Vineyards to launch Curvature Wines, with proceeds directed to breast cancer charities. She deepened her involvement in the industry by passing the Court of Master Sommeliers Level I exam in 2013, the same year she launched her own label, Kerr Cellars, working with winemaker Helen Keplinger on small-production Pinot Noir and Bordeaux-style blends sourced from Napa and Sonoma County vineyards. Wine Spectator named Kerr Cellars a “winery to watch” in its early years, and the label’s wines have reportedly been poured at Thomas Keller’s The French Laundry and Per Se, on Emirates Airlines, and at White House events. Kerr Cellars operates as a standalone boutique winery business rather than a passive licensing deal, with Kerr actively involved in blending decisions.

Kerr and her husband, Erik Stevens, live in Scottsdale, Arizona, where multiple LPGA and lifestyle profiles have placed the family for over a decade. No purchase price, square footage, or assessed value for the Scottsdale property is part of the public record, and no other real estate holdings — vacation homes, investment property, or otherwise — are independently documented. Her Kerr Cellars wine inventory and equipment are a business asset rather than a personal one and are not separately valued in public filings.