Craig Marvin Taborn was born February 20, 1970, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to John Taborn, a psychologist and department chair at the University of Minnesota, and Marjorie Taborn, who worked for the Minneapolis public schools. He grew up in the suburb of Golden Valley and attended Breck School. His parents gave him a Moog synthesizer when he was 12, around the same time he took up piano, receiving his first instruction from his father, who played by ear. Taborn borrowed records from the public library and, listening to public radio, discovered the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and Sun Ra. He studied music theory and composition in high school and, by his own account, is "not a classically trained pianist at all," having come to jazz through rock, progressive rock, and fusion. A formative moment came after attending a concert by the free jazz group Last Exit (Peter Brotzmann, Bill Laswell, Ronald Shannon Jackson, and Sonny Sharrock): he went home and relistened to a Cecil Taylor record he had struggled with, and found it suddenly legible.

Taborn enrolled at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1988, joining the College of Literature, Science and the Arts rather than the jazz program. There he met drummer Gerald Cleaver, with whom he formed an electronic group called the Tracey Science Quartet, and he also played with trumpeter Marcus Belgrave and saxophonist Wendell Harrison. While still a student he joined saxophonist James Carter's band, appearing on a run of Carter's albums beginning with JC on the Set, recorded in 1993. His own recording debut as a leader came in 1994 on the Japanese label DIW: Craig Taborn Trio, with bassist Jaribu Shahid and drummer Tani Tabbal. He graduated in 1995 with a degree in general studies and moved to New York, continuing to tour and record with Carter into 1998.

In New York, Taborn's range widened quickly. In the late 1990s he made his first appearance on the ECM label as a member of Roscoe Mitchell's band, and he played on Detroit producer Carl Craig's techno-jazz project Innerzone Orchestra, released as Programmed in 1999. His second leader date, Light Made Lighter, appeared on Thirsty Ear in 2001 with Chris Lightcap and Gerald Cleaver. Through the 2000s he became, in the words of one biographer, one of the most in-demand musicians in New York, recording under the leadership of Tim Berne, percussionist Susie Ibarra, Steve Coleman, Dave Douglas, Marty Ehrlich, Drew Gress, Evan Parker, and Wadada Leo Smith, among others. In 2004 he released Junk Magic on Thirsty Ear, a quartet date (with Aaron Stewart, Mat Maneri, and Dave King) that abandoned the conventional piano trio for electronics and is now widely regarded as a landmark of jazz-electronica crossover.

The second half of the decade brought sustained work with saxophonist Chris Potter's Underground band, guitarist David Torn's electric quartet Prezens (documented on ECM's self-titled 2007 album, on which Taborn was a core member rather than a guest), and, from 2008, Michael Formanek's quartet alongside Tim Berne and Gerald Cleaver. Taborn later estimated he was part of "seven or eight" regularly working bands at any given time. His appearances on ECM records led by Torn, Roscoe Mitchell, Evan Parker, and Formanek caught the attention of label head Manfred Eicher, and in 2011 ECM released Taborn's first solo piano album, Avenging Angel, following a European solo tour the year before. The same year, he formed the equal-billed collective trio Farmers By Nature with bassist William Parker and Gerald Cleaver (their debut album, self-titled, had already appeared on AUM Fidelity in 2009); the group went on to release Out of This World's Distortions (2011) and Love and Ghosts (2014). Taborn also toured internationally through 2012-14 with Dave Holland's quartet Prism, and in 2013 ECM issued his second leader album, Chants, a trio recording with bassist Thomas Morgan and Cleaver that arrived eight years after the group first began playing together.

Taborn's honors accumulated alongside this run of records: DownBeat named him its electric keyboard Rising Star in 2009 and 2010, then its outright electric keyboard winner (plus piano and organ Rising Star) in 2011; the North Sea Jazz Festival gave him its Paul Acket Award in 2012; JazzTimes critics ranked him best pianist in 2013; the Jazz Journalists Association named him Pianist of the Year in 2014; and later that year he received a Doris Duke Artist Award. His sixth leader album, Flaga: Book of Angels, Volume 27 (2016), set a trio with Christian McBride and Tyshawn Sorey against John Zorn's Masada songbook, and his third ECM leader date, the electro-acoustic quartet record Daylight Ghosts, followed in 2017.

From the late 2010s onward Taborn worked increasingly in duo and small-collective settings that put him alongside other leading pianists and singular improvisers: Octopus (2018) with Kris Davis, Highsmith (2017) with Ikue Mori, and The Transitory Poems (2019), an unedited live duo recital with Vijay Iyer recorded in Budapest as a tribute to recently deceased musicians including Cecil Taylor and Geri Allen. In 2020 the Junk Magic project returned, sixteen years after its debut, with the quintet album Compass Confusion, and ECM released Taborn's second solo piano album, Shadow Plays, the following year. He remained prolific into the 2020s: the collective quartet recording Other Zones (2022, with Berne, Formanek, and Cleaver), the trio hEARoes (2023, with Joelle Leandre and Mat Maneri), the debut of another collective trio, Weird of Mouth (2024, with Mette Rasmussen and Ches Smith), Trio of Bloom (2025, with Nels Cline and Marcus Gilmore), and Dream Archives (2026), his fourth ECM leader date, recorded with cellist Tomeka Reid and Ches Smith. In October 2025, the MacArthur Foundation named Taborn a Fellow.

Taborn's improvising, especially on solo piano, follows what he has described as a modular approach: he begins with small units of melody and rhythm, often as few as three notes, and develops and recombines them into larger structures rather than working from chord changes. His compositions typically substitute superimposed, contrapuntal melodic lines for conventional harmony, and he adapts his touch to whatever instrument is in front of him, drawing a sharper contrast between notes on piano through attack and pedaling than the more opaque, "louder" timbre of a Fender Rhodes allows. Critics have traced his lineage to Duke Ellington, Cecil Taylor, Thelonious Monk, Ran Blake, and Sun Ra; reviewing Light Made Lighter, the Los Angeles Times ranked him among "the most exciting pianists to lead a band since the ascent of Matthew Shipp," and Nate Chinen described Avenging Angel as music "full of moments where a note hangs sharply in the air." Guitarist David Torn has praised Taborn as a musician who asks "what can I do with this instrument?" rather than working through an instrument's standard vocabulary, a description that fits his equally serious engagement with acoustic piano, organ, Moog and other synthesizers, and processed electronics across settings ranging from free improvisation to the techno-jazz of Innerzone Orchestra.