Kristi Viiding studied Estonian language, literature, and classical philology at the University of Tartu, where she earned her PhD in classical philology in 2002. From 1996–2017 she was a faculty member in classical philology at the University of Tartu, and professor there from 2012–2017. Since 2017 she has been working as senior researcher at the Under and Tuglas Literature Centre of the Estonian Academy of Sciences, and since 2018 she has been general secretary of the International Association for Neo-Latin Studies, IANLS.
Kristi Viidingʼs primary areas of research are literature in Latin in the Baltic region, the early modern period, the emergence of secular written Estonian language in the 17^th century and Latin epigraphics in the Baltic region. 
She has published more than 80 scholarly articles, translated from medieval and Neo-Latin into Estonian (Tacitus “On the Origin and Settlement of the Germanic peoples”; Livy “From the Founding of the City”; “Deeds of the Romans”, and 17^th century print sources on the founding of the University of Tartu), and from German into Estonian (Martin Klökerʼs monograph about the literary life in Reval in the first half of the 17^th century).
In 2007 the main prize of the Literature Foundation of the Estonian Cultural capital was bestowed on Kristi Viidingʼs research group for the compilation of an anthology of 17^th century occasional poetry in Tartu (“O Dorpat, urbs addictissima musis… Valik 17. sajandi Tartu juhuluulet”).