Antonin-Tri Hoang was born June 10, 1989, in Paris. He began classical clarinet at nine, and turned toward jazz almost immediately after discovering 1930s swing. His stepfather, a rock guitarist with a taste for gypsy jazz, pushed him toward improvising early, and Hoang picked up saxophone and piano alongside the clarinet while immersing himself in jazz history. He was performing publicly while still a boy, in settings ranging from saxophone and clarinet gigs to the theater; among the productions he appeared in as a young performer was Richard Kalinoski's play Une Bête Sur La Lune, which won five Molière awards in 2001.

At sixteen he entered the jazz and improvised-music class at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris, directed by bassist Riccardo Del Fra, and later studied generative improvisation under saxophonist Vincent Lê Quang. In 2007 he wrote a tribute piece for and with pianist Michel Legrand at the IAJE conference in New York. He also began composing for film and installation art in this period: scores for two films by director Ambarish Mannepalli (Chassé-croisé, 2008, and Wink of the Eye, 2009) and music for two exhibitions by the artist Pierre Huyghe, The Host and the Cloud, in October 2009 and February 2010.

In 2009, artistic director Daniel Yvinec spotted him for a reconceived Orchestre National de Jazz built around multi-instrumentalists drawn from the new generation of the French jazz scene. Hoang recorded Around Robert Wyatt (2009) and Shut Up and Dance (2010) with the ONJ, followed by Piazzolla! (2012) and The Party! (2013), all on Bee Jazz or Jazz Village. The same period put him at the center of a wide network of Paris-based collectives: he co-founded the improvising quartet Novembre, the four-clarinet group Watt (with Julien Pontvianne, Jean Dousteyssier and Jean-Brice Godet), and joined pianist Ève Risser's Grand Bazar project (a Ligeti/Carla Bley/Bach/Aphex Twin program), drummer Anne Paceo's quintet, the AUM Grand Ensemble, bassist Matteo Bortone's Travelers, drummer Guilhem Flouzat's One Way or Another, and the Umlaut Big Band directed by Pierre-Antoine Badaroux. With Jean-Jacques Birgé and cellist Vincent Segal he recorded film scores and performed live alongside Jacques Perconte's experimental film Dépaysages.

In 2011 he released his first duo album, Aéroplanes, with pianist Benoît Delbecq on the Bee Jazz label, playing alto saxophone and bass clarinet across compositions the two split between them. Two years later he joined the Paris band assembled by the Israeli saxophonist Shauli Einav for A Truth About Me (2013, Cristal Records), contributing alto saxophone and bass clarinet to four of its ten tracks alongside pianist Paul Lay, bassist Florent Nisse, drummer Louis Moutin and trombonist Andy Hunter.

In 2017 Hoang and the photographer Dorothée "SMITH" Smith won the Prix Swiss Life à 4 mains, funding a spatialized 16-channel score for their installation at the Palais de Tokyo as part of the exhibition Le Rêve des Formes; the collaboration produced the book-disc Saturnium on Actes Sud, on which Hoang plays synthesizer, reeds, piano and voice. The following year the UK-based Cloudmakers Five, with bassist Michael Janisch, vibraphonist Jim Hart, guitarist Hannes Riepler and drummer Dave Smith, released Traveling Pulse on Whirlwind Recordings, with Hoang on alto saxophone and clarinet. In 2019 he also recorded a self-titled trio album, ELK3, with the American drummer Tyshawn Sorey and the Israeli guitarist Nadav Remez.

From 2019 on, Hoang moved increasingly into musical direction for the theater. He created Disparitions at the Festival d'Automne à Paris in 2019 and staged the musical theater piece Chewing Gum Silence, directed by Samuel Achache, the same year. He went on to lead the music for further Achache productions, including Original d'après une copie perdue (2020, Théâtre de l'Aquarium), Concerto contre piano et orchestre (2021), La Symphonie tombée du ciel (2024, Théâtre de l'Athénée) and Les Incrédules (2025, produced by the Opéra national de Lorraine), while continuing to perform in Fantazio and Théo Ceccaldi's Peplum, the trio Fakebooks (with Thibault Cellier and Sylvain Darrifourcq), and stage productions with Jeanne Candel's company La Vie Brève.

Hoang's playing sits at the intersection of composed and improvised music, carried across an unusually wide set of instruments (alto saxophone, bass clarinet, clarinet, piano, and occasional voice and electronics) rather than settled on one voice. His working life runs in parallel tracks that rarely resemble each other: repertory big-band and orchestral jazz with the Orchestre National de Jazz and the Umlaut Big Band; small collective improvisation in Novembre and the all-clarinet quartet Watt; chamber-scaled duo and trio writing with Benoît Delbecq and, later, with Tyshawn Sorey and Nadav Remez in ELK3; and multimedia composition for photography, installation art and, since 2019, musical theater. The throughline is a composer's instinct for building specific ensembles and forms around a project rather than reusing a fixed working band.