Ariel Bart was born in Israel in 1998 and grew up in Ramat Gan, the daughter of an educator and an engineer, in a house that played Neil Young, Bob Dylan and Stevie Wonder. The harmonica was her older sister's idea before it was hers. Their mother enrolled the sister in the children's harmonica orchestra founded a short walk from the family's home by Shmuel Gogol, the Polish-born player who had been a pupil of Janusz Korczak, was given a harmonica as a child, survived Auschwitz playing in the camp orchestra, and on reaching Israel built a children's harmonica orchestra in Ramat Gan that now carries his name. Bart, who was seven, followed her sister in. The sister eventually moved on (she is now an actor and singer at the Cameri Theatre) and Bart stayed, playing largely classical and folk repertoire alongside about forty other children under the direction of Alex Reiss. That, by her own account, is where she fell in love with the instrument, and she has never had another one.

The family later moved to Moshav Beit Zayit outside Jerusalem, and Bart entered the jazz track at the Jerusalem High School of the Arts, graduating from its music department in 2016. She has said that the school is where she first understood what jazz's freedom and improvisation actually meant. She was then accepted into the Israel Defense Forces as a distinguished musician, and studied concurrently at the Stricker Conservatory in Tel Aviv, on a four-year degree program half of which is taught in New York. After her discharge she moved to New York for the second half of it and graduated from the New School's jazz and contemporary music program in May 2020. Her teachers there and in Israel included Aaron Parks, Reggie Workman, Shai Maestro, Jane Ira Bloom, Anat Cohen, Anat Fort and Tony Malaby.

Her first recorded work came out of that New York period and out of the free jazz end of the city rather than the mainstream. On September 13, 2019 she cut The Center Will Hold with trombonist Steve Swell, released by the Polish label Not Two Records in 2020 in a sextet with Andrew Cyrille on drums, Jason Kao Hwang on violin and viola, Fred Lonberg-Holm on cello and Robert Boston on piano and organ. She also plays across two complete volumes of William Parker's ten-disc The Music Of William Parker: Migration Of Silence Into And Out Of The Tone World (Centering Records, January 29, 2021): volume six, Mexico, and volume eight, Lights In The Rain (The Italian Directors Suite), fourteen pieces in all, in bands that also included the Israeli musicians Ohad Kapuya on bass and Illay Sabag on piano.

The pandemic sent her back to Israel in 2020 with a folder of material she had begun collecting in New York. "As soon as we came out of the first lockdown I gathered my band and we started recording," she told Maariv. The result was In Between, eight originals cut and mixed at the Yellow Submarine in Jerusalem with Arik Finkelberg engineering, and released on Ropeadope on May 20, 2021: a quintet of harmonica and cello over a piano trio, with Mayu Shviro on cello, Moshe Elmakias on piano, David Michaeli on double bass and Amir Bar Akiva on drums. It was reviewed in Jazz Journal and London Jazz News in Britain and across the Belgian, French and Italian jazz press, and in February 2022 one of its tunes, "Colors Palette," won first prize in the Pros and Amateurs category of the 7 Virtual Jazz Club competition in Milan. The prize carried a masterclass at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam and a concert at the Ferrara jazz club, which she played that November.

Documentaries followed, recorded at Kicha Studio in Tel Aviv in September 2021 and released by Ropeadope on October 21, 2022. Michaeli and Bar Akiva stayed, Eden Giat took the piano chair, Shviro kept the cello, and Itamar Borochov was added on trumpet for a sextet reading of nine more Bart originals. Around the same time she began working as a trio with cellist Talia Erdal and pianist Arseny Rykov, an instrumentation with no rhythm section at all, and it is that group that has carried most of her touring since. The trio recorded The Trio Project, a three-part suite cut live in Tel Aviv in August 2023 and issued in February 2024, then made After Silence at Bauer Studios in Ludwigsburg in November 2024, released on vinyl and CD on September 19, 2025. A separate duo with guitarist Omri Bar Giora produced Deep Down in May 2024.

Bart moved to Berlin and works out of it now, with management in France and press representation across four European territories. Her documented dates run from Sunset in Paris, Unterfahrt in Munich, the Abbaye de Neumünster in Luxembourg and the Ora Jazz Festival in Romania to the Bray Jazz Festival in Ireland, the Jazzfestival Münster, a jazzahead! showcase in Bremen in April 2024 and the Freespace Jazz Fest at Hong Kong's West Kowloon Cultural District on October 25, 2024. In Israel she has played the Red Sea Jazz Festival in Eilat with her own quintet in 2022 and in a quartet with flutist Hadar Noiberg in 2024, the Jerusalem harmonica festival, and the Queenta women's jazz festival. Outside her own bands she has appeared as a soloist with the Jerusalem Orchestra East and West, has performed and recorded with Achinoam Nini (Noa), Miki Gavrielov and David D'Or, and plays harmonica on the closing track of Japanese drummer Rintaro Mikami's debut First Fish (2023). She taught a masterclass at the Harmonica FEN Festival in Berlin in May 2024 and returns to it as a workshop leader in 2026.

Bart plays chromatic rather than diatonic harmonica, and she is explicit about why: the diatonic instrument is locked to one key and points toward blues and country, while the chromatic, built like a keyboard with its own black notes, is the one that lets her play jazz. What she writes for it is lyrical, slow-moving and deliberately singable, and she describes the instrument as something you sing through rather than play. The Middle Eastern and Arab material she listens to enters the tunes as inflection rather than as quotation, and the pairing of harmonica with cello on all four of her records gives the front line a reedy, chamber-music weight that reviewers have compared to an accordion and to French chanson. Her piano, which is her second instrument and the one she composes on, is audible in the writing: she cites Keith Jarrett as a listening habit and Anouar Brahem's Tunisian oud records as a model for how a melody can carry a whole record. Every reviewer of her first album reached for the same short list of jazz chromatic harmonica players, Toots Thielemans above all, and then Hendrik Meurkens, Antonio Serrano, Karen Mantler and Stevie Wonder; Citizen Jazz concluded that she had killed the father and imposed her own sleek, direct style, and Jazz Journal singled out a clear tone that stands out from the band and a gift for nostalgic melody. Her sideman work sits at the opposite pole from her own writing, in the free jazz of Steve Swell and William Parker, and she has said she is at her strongest leading her own group.