María Kim Grand was born in 1992 in Geneva, Switzerland, to a Swiss mother and an Argentinian father, and grew up in a musical household, starting saxophone at age ten. In 2011, at eighteen, she left the Professional Conservatory of Music in Geneva for New York City, enrolling at City College of New York and obtaining her artist visa in 2012. The move put her directly in the orbit of some of the city's most demanding improvisers, and she has been based there ever since, touring as both leader and sideman across Europe, the Americas, and beyond.

Grand's early New York years were built on mentorship rather than a conservatory track alone. She studied with tenor saxophonist Billy Harper, with Antoine Roney — with whose quartet she toured France, Switzerland, Italy, and Greece — and with alto legend Steve Coleman and saxophonist-arranger Ohad Talmor. In 2012 she was one of the musicians chosen for a homage to NEA Jazz Master Von Freeman, sharing the stage with Julian Priester and Art Hoyle; around the same period she became a regular member of drummer Doug Hammond's quintet, playing rooms and festivals that included the North Sea Jazz Festival and Vienna's Porgy & Bess. Further credits from those years include Roman Filiú's quintet, the Valery Ponomarev Big Band, the Howard Williams Big Band, and the new-music group Talea Ensemble — the range of a young player absorbing everything the city's overlapping scenes (straight-ahead, big band, chamber-new-music) had to offer at once.

The Steve Coleman relationship went further than mentorship: Grand played tenor saxophone on and worked as a copyist for two of Coleman's own recordings, Synovial Joints (2015, Steve Coleman and the Council of Balance, Pi Recordings) and Morphogenesis (2017, Steve Coleman's Natal Eclipse, Pi Recordings) — sessions that also included trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson, pianist Matt Mitchell, vocalist Jen Shyu, and violinist Kristin Lee. Coleman's mathematically rigorous, cyclical approach to rhythm left a clear mark on Grand's own writing, which returns again and again to numerological and cosmological structure even as her sound moved toward something more overtly vocal and lyrical than Coleman's.

As a leader, Grand's catalog opens with TetraWind (2017), a self-released, compass-direction-themed EP that the NYC Jazz Record named one of that year's best debuts, with Román Filiú, David Bryant, Rashaan Carter, and Craig Weinrib. Her first full-length, Magdalena (2018, Biophilia Records) — with a larger ensemble including guitarist Mary Halvorson — set Egyptian and early-Christian myth against the ideas of family therapist Virginia Satir, and reached #6 on Billboard's Top Jazz Albums list for the year; JazzTimes named her its Best New Artist. Reciprocity (2021, Biophilia) pulled the frame back down to a stripped, classic tenor trio with bassist Kanoa Mendenhall and drummer Savannah Harris; Grand wrote the album's twelve pieces in early 2020 while five and a half months pregnant with her son, and reviewers heard a direct line back to the great Sonny Rollins trio records in its "elastic conversation in a blues vernacular." The New York Times has called her "an engrossing young tenor saxophonist with a zesty attack and a solid tonal range."

Grand's output since 2024 has moved outward into duo and collective settings: Anohin (2024, Biophilia), a saxophone-and-voice/piano duo album with pianist Marta Sánchez; Altered Visions (2024, Lilaila Records), a co-led quintet date with Camila Nebbia, Marta Sánchez, Kanoa Mendenhall, and Iago Fernández; and In Trialogue (Live at Porgy & Bess) (2024, Horus Music), a trio recording with vocalist Luisa Muhr and violinist/guitarist Eric Arn. Her newest project, Both Sides (2026, Lilaila Records), pairs her with pianist Angelica Sánchez, bassist Rashaan Carter, drummer Miguel Russell, guitarist Emmanuel Michael, percussionist Shakoor Hakeem, and alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins across a set exploring love, displacement, and self-discovery, released with spoken liner-note interludes between the songs. Outside the recording studio, Grand has also toured Persephone/HerStory (2018–2019), a solo saxophone-voice-and-gong theater piece retelling the myth of Persephone from Persephone's own point of view, devised with writer and visual artist Satya Celeste and performed at venues including L'Abri in Geneva and Seattle's Wayward Music Series.

Grand's collaborator list runs across the width of New York's creative-music scene: pianists Vijay Iyer, Craig Taborn, and Angelica Sánchez; guitarist Mary Halvorson; vocalists Jen Shyu and Fay Victor; flutist Nicole Mitchell; saxophonist Steve Lehman; and percussionist-composer Rajna Swaminathan, on whose Of Agency and Abstraction (2019, Biophilia) she also appears as a sideman. Further sideman credits include vibraphonist Joel Ross's The Parable of the Poet (2022, Blue Note) and Gospel Music (2026, Blue Note); pianist Yaron Herman's Radio Paradise (2025, Naïve); Mary Halvorson's Code Girl on Artlessly Falling (2020, Firehouse 12); singer-songwriter Helado Negro's Far In (2021, 4AD); and drummer Greg Fox's The Gradual Progression (2017, RVNG Intl.). Bassist Ben Tiberio — profiled separately on JazzProfiles.com — names Grand among the bandleaders he's anchored on bass in his own artist biography, though no specific joint recording between them appears in either musician's discography; the connection, on the evidence available, is a working/touring one rather than a documented studio credit.

Grand's connection to pianist Aaron Parks — also profiled separately on JazzProfiles.com — is independently documented: in July 2017, Parks convened a band at The Jazz Gallery for shows on the 14th and 15th featuring Grand alongside vibraphonist Chris Dingman, bassist Matt Penman, and drummer Anwar Marshall, a group Jazz Speaks described as striking "a keen balance of fire and lyricism." Grand's own artist biographies (via Pi Recordings and Metropolis Ensemble) separately list Parks among musicians she has performed with, corroborating the connection from her side as well as his.

Grand's commission and residency history includes the 2017 Jazz Gallery Residency Commission (awarded alongside fellow young players Adam O'Farrill and Joel Ross), the 2018 Roulette Jerome Foundation Commission, a 2019 Roulette artist residency, and the 2020 Jazz Coalition Commission Award. In 2022 she composed a chamber piece, "Your Very Own Sun," that folds somatic healing practice into concert music. She continues to lead her own ensemble, DiaTribe, as the primary vehicle for her original writing.

Grand's playing sits at the intersection of two lineages that don't often overlap: the cyclical, near-mathematical rhythmic logic she absorbed directly from Steve Coleman during her time performing and copying charts for his groups, and a Sonny Rollins-descended tenor voice — long, unhurried, thematically developing lines that reviewers have repeatedly reached for Rollins comparisons to describe. Over that foundation she layers her own voice, often in wordless or textural counterpoint with the horn via circular breathing, so that saxophone and vocals function as a single extended instrument rather than lead-and-accompaniment. Thematically, her work returns obsessively to myth, ritual, and the "healing qualities of feminine psyche" — Egyptian and early-Christian mythology on Magdalena, the Persephone story reclaimed from a woman's own point of view in Persephone/HerStory, motherhood and creation mythology on Reciprocity — using ancient narrative as a lens for very present concerns about family, power, and transformation. The result has been described, accurately, as sitting inside modern creative and spiritual jazz: structurally ambitious, historically literate, and never merely nostalgic even when it's in direct conversation with the tradition.