She attended Wycombe Abbey School in High Wycombe and served in the Women"s Royal Naval Service during the Second World War. She completed a postgraduate diploma at University College London in 1950 studying Mesopotamian and Palestinian archaeology under Sir Max Mallowan and Dame Kathleen Kenyon.
Kirkbride went to work on the excavations of Jericho from 1952 to 1955. In 1953, she began fieldwork in Jordan, including the restoration of the Jerash Theatre and excavations at Petra in 1956. During her studies of the paleolithic and Neolithic of the area, she excavated a small rock shelter called Wadi Madamagh and made excavations at Ard Tlaili in Lebanon.
She also discovered a major Neolithic site at Beidha where she led the excavations for the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem from 1958 until 1967.
She continued work in Iraq in the 1970s where she made another discovery of another Neolithic site called Umm Dabaghiyah. She also finished work compiling the results from Beidha and Umm Dabaghiyah and started planning a new excavation of a Nabataean temple at Wadi Rum which was not completed before her death in August 1997 at Aarhus, Denmark.
Director of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq. Oxford University"s Gerald Avery Wainwright Fellowship in Near Eastern Archaeology Fellowship of the Society of Antiquaries.
