Kim Krans trained formally as a visual artist before she became known for tarot, earning a BFA in drawing from Cooper Union in New York, an MFA in mixed media from Hunter College, and later a masters degree in depth psychology and creativity from the Pacifica Graduate Institute in California. As a teenager she left her high school varsity basketball team to attend Interlochen Arts Academy on a scholarship for drawing and creative writing.
In 2012 she hand drew, self published and began selling The Wild Unknown Tarot, a black and white deck built around animal and plant imagery rather than traditional human figures, taking its name from a Bob Dylan lyric. The deck's grassroots following grew large enough that HarperCollins, under its HarperElixir imprint, published it nationally in 2016, and that wider release is what reached the New York Times bestseller list, becoming one of the defining independently produced tarot decks of the 2010s, eventually followed by two further Wild Unknown decks, an animal spirit oracle and an archetypes deck.
Beyond publishing, Krans has studied yoga and shamanic practice in India, Africa and Europe, and now teaches workshops built around drawing, meditation and what she describes as creative transformation. Her work sits at the intersection of fine art training and popular divination practice, and her insistence on hand drawn, self published production before wider distribution is frequently cited within tarot publishing as a model other independent deck creators have since followed.