Kris Davis was born in 1980 in Vancouver, British Columbia, and grew up in Calgary, Alberta, beginning classical piano at the Royal Conservatory of Music at age six. She discovered jazz as a teenager by transcribing recordings of Herbie Hancock and Keith Jarrett, and in 1997 and 2000 she attended the jazz program at the Banff Centre for the Arts, where she first played alongside saxophonist Tony Malaby. She majored in jazz piano at the University of Toronto, graduating in 2001, and that same year won a Canada Council for the Arts grant to study privately in New York with pianist Jim McNeely, the move that took her permanently to the city.

In New York, Davis quickly built a working circle of like-minded improvisers, married drummer Jeff Davis, and in 2004 recorded her debut as a leader, Lifespan (Fresh Sound New Talent), a sextet date cut in Brooklyn with Malaby, Jeff Davis, bassist Eivind Opsvik, trumpeter Russ Johnson, and reedman Jason Rigby. In 2006 she studied briefly in Paris with pianist Benoît Delbecq, and in 2008 she returned to a version of the Lifespan band, minus horns, for the trio record Rye Eclipse (Fresh Sound New Talent), with Malaby and Jeff Davis. Around this period she has said she "decided not to play chords anymore, just to play lines," a shift toward a sparer, more contrapuntal language that reshaped her writing for the rest of the decade.

That shift produced Aeriol Piano (2011, Clean Feed), her first solo piano album, which incorporated prepared-piano preparations inside the instrument, and the co-led trio Paradoxical Frog, formed in 2010 with saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and drummer Tyshawn Sorey. In October 2011, critic Ben Ratliff profiled Davis in The New York Times as one of four "New Pilots at the Keyboard," a marker of her arrival as a pianist of national note; around the same period she completed a master's degree in classical composition at the City College of New York. The quartet record Capricorn Climber (2013, Clean Feed), with Laubrock, bassist Trevor Dunn, drummer Tom Rainey, and violist Mat Maneri, and the solo album Massive Threads (2013, Thirsty Ear) followed in close succession, cementing a reputation built as much on dense, structurally ambitious writing as on her playing.

Davis received the Doris Duke Impact Award in 2015, and in 2016 she founded her own label, Pyroclastic Records, launching it with Duopoly, eight duets and duo videos recorded with a deliberately mixed roster: guitarists Bill Frisell and Julian Lage, pianists Craig Taborn and Angelica Sanchez, reedman Tim Berne, clarinetist Don Byron, and drummers Marcus Gilmore and Billy Drummond. The album made year-end lists at The New York Times, NPR Music, and PopMatters. DownBeat's Critics Poll named her Rising Star Pianist in 2017 and Rising Star Artist in 2018, and in 2018 she paired again with Taborn for the duo album Octopus (Pyroclastic).

Diatom Ribbons (released October 4, 2019, Pyroclastic), an electroacoustic sextet session with Taborn, drummer Ches Smith, Dunn, turntablist/electronics player Val Jeanty, and guests including guitarist Marc Ribot and drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, was named jazz album of the year by both The New York Times and the NPR Music Jazz Critics Poll; the Jazz Journalists Association followed by naming Davis its 2020 Pianist of the Year and Composer of the Year. She formed the collectively improvising Borderlands Trio with bassist Stephan Crump and drummer Eric McPherson around 2019, documenting the group on Wandersphere (2021, Intakt) and, later, Rewilder (2024, Intakt). In 2021 she received the larger Doris Duke Artist Award, and in late May 2022 she led a six-night Diatom Ribbons residency at the Village Vanguard, issued in 2023 as Diatom Ribbons Live at the Village Vanguard (Pyroclastic), with Lage and Carrington joining the working band. Also in 2022, Davis was one of five core musicians, alongside Carrington, trumpeter Nicholas Payton, guitarist Matthew Stevens, and bassist Linda May Han Oh, on Carrington's New Standards, Vol. 1 (Candid), a recording of pieces from Carrington's songbook New Standards: 101 Lead Sheets by Women Composers; the album won the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Album at the 65th Annual Grammy Awards in February 2023, Davis's first Grammy. She has since released Run The Gauntlet (2024, Pyroclastic) with bassist Robert Hurst and drummer Johnathan Blake, and continues to teach at Berklee College of Music's Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice, which she joined in 2019.

Davis's music runs against the two poles that a pianist's training typically pulls toward, harmonic comping and melodic soloing, in favor of dense, interlocking lines, extended prepared-piano textures, and structures worked out first on paper as concert-length compositions rather than head-solos-head forms. Her writing draws as much on her classical composition training as on the free-jazz and postbop lineage of pianists like Cecil Taylor and Paul Bley, and she has built her career around an unusually wide range of steady creative partnerships, from the horn-driven small groups of her early Fresh Sound records to the electroacoustic, turntable-inflected sound of Diatom Ribbons. Critics have repeatedly singled her out as a leading composer-pianist of her generation: DownBeat's international critics named her a Rising Star twice running, the Jazz Journalists Association named her Pianist and Composer of the Year in 2020, and Diatom Ribbons topped both The New York Times' and NPR Music's year-end jazz polls in 2019.