Artist. She received notoriety as the co-designer and artist of the Rider-Waite deck of Tarot cards, which was made in April of 1909. Using Rider Publisher, she and Arthur Edward Waite, an author and occultist, were the co-designer of these world-wide-known Rider-Waite Tarot cards. To supplement the cards, Waite wrote a guide, “The Pictorial Key to the Tarot” published in 1911, which is still available. She had painted each card in bright colors, yet the prints in Waite's book were black and white not showing the true beauty of her cards. As as a child she moved between Britain, the United States, and Jamaica; she spoke with a Jamaican Creole accent. Known as “Pixie” to her friends, she appeared as one with her petite, exotic appearance and fashion statements. After touring with a theater group around the United States, in 1893 she enrolled at the Morris Pratt Institute to study fine art. Her art instructor Arthur Wesley Dow inspired her to work through the sensory technique. By playing music, she would “see music” in colored pictures, thus this became the technique she later used to design the Rider-Waite Tarot cards. She did not graduate from Pratt as she returned to Jamaica when her mother became ill and eventually died in July of 1896. During this time, she wrote a book with illustrations about her childhood in Jamaica, ”Annancy Stories,” which was published in 1899 and is still available. Appearing in Washington D.C.'s “Morning Times” the same year, a review of her art called her an “American girl to be proud of ...with a very great deal of talent and ambition.” In November of 1906, she suggested that her ink drawings and watercolors be displayed in Alfred Stieglitz' Little Galleries of Photo-Secession in New York City. The gallery, which was known at one time as “291,” had only exhibited photography in the past, but he agreed as he thought it would be "highly instructive to compare drawings and photographs in order to judge photography's possibilities and limitations.” The show opened in the winter of 1907 and was the most popular exhibit in the gallery's two-year history. All of her pieces were sold, which led to two more successful exhibitions at the gallery by 1909. After the last exhibition, she returned to England. In 1909, Waite paid her a flat fee to do the illustrations and paint 78 Tarot cards. She had met Waite at an occult gathering and understood what he wanted to achieve. She had well-known suffragette Edy Craig pose as the model for the card of “Queen of Wands.” She painted 80 cards in six months, which according to her, was more work than the cash she received. Waite made a fortune on the sale of the cards. Eventually, the cards' name of Waite-Smith was changed to include the publisher's name of Rider and replacing hers, thus becoming “Rider-Waite” cards. In the 21st century, these cards rank #1 in world out of fifty decks according to several international Tarot associations. By 1911, she converted to the Roman Catholic faith, which at that time was not being accepted well in England. She drew illustrations for many noted authors including William Butler Yeats who mistakenly thought her exotic look was from a Japanese ancestry, thus she drew herself in a caricature wearing a kimono. It was Yeats who introduced her to Waite. Besides her paintings, she also wrote poetry, designed costumes for the theater, and provided illustrations for posters as part of the women's suffrage movement. In 1917 she received an inheritance from an uncle making her independent. In 1941 she was recognized as an artist by the Royal Society for Encouragement of Arts. The next year she opened a bed and breakfast with a chapel for Roman Catholic priests in the seaside town of Bude in Northern Cornwall. After World War II in 1946 and with her declining health, she made her last visit to the United States. She died from heart disease. With her death, her paintings and drawings were sold at auction to allay her debts. Her house went to Nora Lake, her companion for many years. She never married. The occupation listed on her death certificate was not artist but read “Spinster of Independent Means.” In 2017, a group of her international fans searched for her burial site in Cornwall and summarized: First, no other cemetery was a serious candidate for the burial except her local parish church. Since she was living in poverty at the time of her death, no grave marker was placed on her grave, which was now in a neglected cemetery. The plot site would have been recorded in the parish church records but there was a fire after her death, thus these records were lost. Researchers believe “that she was buried close to the wall and woods in the old part of the churchyard.” The thought of her being cremated was eliminated early in the research as it was then against her Roman Catholic faith. Her ink and watercolor 1907 painting, "Egmont" was purchased by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 1984. Stuart Kaplan's 2012 book, "Pamela Colman Smith: The Untold Story,” gives his 40-year collection of the details of her life in 444 pages with photos of her non-tarot paintings.