Kim Krans

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.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Wild Unknown Tarot is often told as a solo story, one artist hand drawing an entire deck alone before HarperCollins picked it up nationally, and that account is accurate as far as it goes. What it leaves out is what The Wild Unknown became afterward: an arts collective Kim Krans curates together with her husband, musician Arjan Miranda, extending the original deck project into a joint creative practice rather than a single finished product she moved on from.

A PRINT Magazine profile on the family's work described the balancing act directly, an artist and a musician running overlapping creative businesses, e-commerce operations and a family together, treating the commercial machinery behind a bestselling tarot deck, shipping, licensing, a growing product line, as work shared across a household and a working artistic partnership rather than carried by one name alone.

Krans traces her own path from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where she was born and raised, to Portland, Oregon, where she is now based, a cross country route the deck's own creation story, built around a New York art education and a self published launch, does not mention. That geographic arc, rural Michigan to a New York arts education to a West Coast creative household, frames The Wild Unknown collective's current home base as the latest stop in a longer personal move rather than a fixed studio address attached to the deck from the start.