Bria Skonberg was born in 1983 in Chilliwack, British Columbia, in the Fraser Valley east of Vancouver; her paternal great-grandparents came from Sweden. She took piano lessons in elementary school and switched to trumpet in her early teens, on her father's advice, joining a school band program that included a small traditional-jazz group. She absorbed records by Louis Armstrong, Nicholas Payton, Duke Ellington, Kenny Ball and Jim Cullum, and was mentored by the Australian-born hot-jazz trumpeter Simon Stribling. In high school and college she played festivals with the traditional-jazz band The 51st Eight, led the all-female Mighty Aphrodite Jazz Band and The Big Bang Jazz Band, and performed and recorded with the Canadian bandleader Dal Richards and his orchestra. She graduated from Capilano University in Vancouver in 2006 with a degree in jazz trumpet, won the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Jazz Award of Merit that year, and took the Kobe Jazz Street Award at the Breda Jazz Festival in 2007.

Her first album, Fresh, came out in 2009 on Lighter Than Air Records, with Vancouver players including bassist Jodi Proznick and clarinetist and saxophonist Evan Arntzen. She moved to New York City in 2010 and studied privately with the trumpeter Warren Vaché. In New York she worked with Wycliffe Gordon, Bucky Pizzarelli, Howard Alden, Jon-Erik Kellso and Emily Asher; she plays trumpet on several tracks of Gordon's Louis Armstrong tribute Hello Pops! (2011). She is credited as a co-founder of the New York Hot Jazz Festival and co-produces the NY Hot Jazz Camp, an annual program for adult players and singers, and she teaches and programs concerts for institutions including the Louis Armstrong House Museum, Jazz at Lincoln Center and Jazz House Kids.

So Is the Day (2012, Random Act Records) was mostly her own songs, nine of its twelve tracks, with guests including John Pizzarelli, Gordon, the saxophonist Victor Goines and the drummer Ulysses Owens Jr. Into Your Own followed on Random Act in 2014, with the percussionist Mino Cinelu among the guests. She was nominated for the Jazz Journalists Association's Artist of the Year award in 2013 and received the Swing! Award from Jazz at Lincoln Center in 2015. After signing with Sony Masterworks and its Okeh imprint she released Bria on September 23, 2016, with pianist Aaron Diehl, vibraphonist Stefon Harris, bassist Reginald Veal, drummer Ali Jackson and Arntzen, and with Matt Pierson among its producers. The crowd-funded album won the 2017 Juno Award for Vocal Jazz Album of the Year, and her website says it reached number five on Billboard's jazz chart.

With a Twist (Okeh, 2017) leaned on lounge, bossa nova and pop material, with a larger ensemble that included strings, flutes and percussion, keyboards and accordion by Gil Goldstein, bassist Scott Colley, drummer Matt Wilson and pianists Aaron Goldberg and Sullivan Fortner; it earned a 2018 Juno nomination in the same category. She released Nothing Never Happens on her own in November 2019, a leaner small-group set with pianist Mathis Picard, organist Jon Cowherd, guitarist Doug Wamble, bassist Devin Starks, drummer Darrian Douglas and saxophonist Patrick Bartley, produced by Eli Wolf, and it brought a third Juno nomination in 2020. In December 2020 she joined Pedrito Martinez and Sofia Rei on a Spanish-language single of "The Little Drummer Boy."

She returned to New Orleans jazz on What It Means (Cellar Music, July 26, 2024), recorded in New Orleans in February 2023 with drummer Herlin Riley, banjoist and guitarist Don Vappie, pianist Chris Pattishall and Ben Jaffe on sousaphone; it includes a duet with Gabrielle Cavassa on Van Morrison's "Days Like This." In 2026 she issued two companion albums on Cellar Music, both recorded in New York in the summer of 2025: Brass (March), a trumpet-centered quartet date with a guest trumpeter, and Indigo (July 3), a vocal album of standards and ballads with a string quartet, alto flute and bass clarinet, arranged by Goldstein. Her website lists ten DownBeat Rising Star citations and a Legend Award from the Society for the Preservation of the Great American Songbook. She has lived and worked in New York since 2010.

Skonberg plays in the line of Louis Armstrong, whom Wikipedia notes she credits as an early inspiration, with a bright trumpet tone and a command of mutes that DownBeat's April 2026 review of Brass singled out; the same review heard a Miles Davis-like smoothness in her sound, with more vibrato, and judged that she is a trumpeter first and a singer second. Her roots are in hot jazz and New Orleans traditional jazz, but her records range across swing, bossa nova, hard-bop treatments of pop hits and original songs; Nate Chinen of the New York Times, quoted on her website, tied her singing to Anita O'Day. She is a repeat Juno nominee in the vocal jazz category, and she has become one of the most visible younger voices of the New York hot-jazz revival, in part through her camp and teaching work.