Tim Kreider was born in Baltimore in 1967, and graduated from the Johns Hopkins University's Writing Seminars program in 1988. He has been stabbed in the throat in Crete, ridden the Ringling Brothers circus train to Mexico City, attended to a friend's recovery from gender reassignment surgery in Neenah, Wisconsin, and addressed the Forum on Innovative Approaches to Outer Planetary Exploration 2001-2020 at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. He is also the author of groundbreaking critical essays on films such as “Eyes Wide Shut” and “The Straight Story”, which originally appeared in Film Quarterly and have subsequently been anthologized.

Tim Kreider self-published issue #1 of The Pain--When Will It End? as a mini-comic in 1994. The cartoon began running weekly in the Baltimore City Paper in 1997, and has since been picked up by the Jackson Planet Weekly and The Indy in Bloomington-Normal, Illinois. Tim Kreider's original artwork has been exhibited in Baltimore, Chicago, and New York. His cartoon "Blowing One's Cool in the Clutch" was included in the Catholic League's 2002 Report on Anti-Catholicism. He is among the artists featured in Attitude 2: The New Subversive Social Commentary Cartoonists, edited by Ted Rall. A collection of his more recent political work, to be titled Why Do They Kill Me?, will be released by Fantagraphics in 2005. He migrates seasonally between an A-frame cabin on the Chesapeake Bay and New York City.