Andrea Brachfeld was born May 3, 1954, in Utica, New York. Piano lessons began at six, mandatory in her household, and she switched to flute at ten. She attended the High School of Music and Art starting in 1969, where classmates included violinist Noel Pointer, pianist Nat Adderley Jr., and fellow flutist Dave Valentin, and she played her first professional gig at sixteen, fronting her own quartet at an "All Night Soul" concert at St. Peter's Church. She studied with saxophonists Jimmy Heath and Yusef Lateef through the Jazzmobile and Jazz Interactions workshop programs, and in 1974 Jazz Interactions awarded her its Louis Armstrong Award for outstanding jazz student. She enrolled at the Manhattan School of Music in 1973, studying flute with Harold Bennett, Andrew Loyla and Hubert Laws and improvisation with Sam Barron, Eddie Daniels and George Coleman; her classmates there included pianists Kenny Kirkland and Fred Hersch, violinist Angie Bofill, and guitarist Rodney Jones.

Her professional breakthrough came in New York's charanga scene, discovered at the Tin Palace club in lower Manhattan. She worked through a string of charanga and salsa orchestras, including Tipica New York, the Benito Sextet, Tipica Ideal, Charanga America, Joe Quijano's band, Conjunto Libre and Joe Cuba's group, and sat in on occasion with Tito Puente, Ray Barretto and Machito. Her defining early association was Charanga '76, whose 1976 self-titled album (TR Records) credits her on flute across the whole record; she has been described as the first female flutist to play salsa music professionally in the United States. In 1978 she released her debut LP, Andrea (Latina Records), produced by Vicente Barreira and Jose Madera and featuring conguero Louis Bauzo, trombonist Barry Rogers and bassist Bobby Rodriguez.

A four-week engagement then took her to Venezuela for two and a half years, where she performed at Caracas's Juan Sebastian Bar, played studio jingle sessions, led her own Latin jazz band, and opened concerts for Gary Burton, Paco de Lucia and Chick Corea. Seventeen quieter years followed, spent raising a family and completing graduate study, during which she kept a lower-profile local performing schedule.

She resumed a full recording career at the turn of the millennium: a self-produced 1998 CD led to a deal with San Francisco's Spirit Nectar Records, and a 1999 studio date first appeared on her own Shaneye Music imprint as Remembered Dreams before being reissued in 2003 by Latin Cool Records (some later accounts instead date its release to 2001 on Spirit Nectar; the two Discogs-verified pressings and the Spirit Nectar account do not fully agree, and the discrepancy is stated here rather than resolved by guessing). Latin Cool also released 2003's Back With Sweet Passion, a charanga-jazz hybrid featuring pianist Oscar Hernandez, violinist Alfredo de la Fe and percussionist Wilson "Chembo" Corniel; the same recording later reached streaming services retitled Son Charanga. In 2006 she co-billed Beyond Standards with Corniel on Consolidated Artists Productions, with Hilton Ruiz, Steve Turre and Pedrito Martinez in the band.

Pianist Bill O'Connell, previously the longtime musical director for Dave Valentin, became her principal collaborator, arranger and producer starting with 2008's Into the World: A Musical Offering (Shaneye Music, with guests Mike Longo, Paul West and Brian Lynch). A 2009 devotional recording, Songs From the Divine, appeared under her spiritual name Kala Devi. O'Connell produced and arranged 2012's Lady of the Island (Zoho), which drew Wallace Roney for trumpet solos and Wycliffe Gordon on trombone, both verified at the Discogs release level. Lotus Blossom followed on Jazzheads in October 2015, with a band the artist credits as Rufus Reid, Winard Harper, Wycliffe Gordon, Chembo Corniel and vocalist Nancy Harms (Discogs carries no surviving personnel listing for this release, so the credits here follow the artist's own published discography). That October, Hot House Magazine named her its Best Jazz Flutist. In June 2017 she received a commission grant from Chamber Music America and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, which fed into 2018's If Not Now, When? (Jazzheads), the debut recording by her working trio of O'Connell, bassist Harvie S (Harvie Swartz) and drummer Jason Tiemann, confirmed at the Discogs release level as a full-album core band.

That same trio, plus guests, made 2020's Brazilian Whispers (Origin Records), a program of mostly Antonio Carlos Jobim compositions and originals recorded with two alternating rhythm sections: O'Connell, Harvie S and Tiemann on some tracks, Brazilian drummer Portinho and bassist Lincoln Goines on others, with Corniel on percussion throughout. Guitarist Roni Ben-Hur guests on six of the album's eleven tracks (1, 4 through 6, 8 and 9), a credit confirmed directly against the Discogs release data. Brachfeld herself is the full-album flute and producer credit. In 2022 the same core trio, billed as Andrea Brachfeld and Insight, released Evolution on Origin, recorded at Mozart Studios in Little Falls, New Jersey. She continues to tour in multiple projects: a Bill O'Connell-led tribute band to her late high school classmate Dave Valentin (who died in 2017), which toured Japan and played Tokyo's Cotton Club; the Wallace Roney "Universe" Orchestra; Santi Debriano's Flash of the Spirit and Arkestra Bembe ensembles, both confirmed at the Discogs release level as full-album flute credits; and Bill O'Connell and the Afro Caribbean Ensemble, on whose 2019 Savant album Wind Off the Hudson she appears on eight of ten tracks.

Brachfeld's voice grew out of two overlapping New York traditions: the flute-and-violin charanga dance orchestras she came up in during the 1970s, and the post-bop vocabulary she absorbed studying with Hubert Laws and George Coleman at the Manhattan School of Music. That combination let her move between driving Afro-Cuban dance-band charts and harmonically dense small-group jazz writing, often on the same album, and she has expanded her instrumental palette over the years to include alto flute and, on Evolution, Colombian clay flute and African wood flute. A parallel devotional strand runs through her catalog, surfacing most directly on the 2009 Songs From the Divine, recorded under her spiritual name Kala Devi. She was one of the first women to build a career as a lead flutist inside the male-dominated New York salsa and charanga circuit of the 1970s, and Hot House Magazine named her its Best Jazz Flutist in 2015.