Camila Meza was born July 22, 1985, in Santiago, Chile, to two journalist parents; her father also played piano and encouraged her toward music, and an older brother who played drums introduced her to prog-rock and classic rock. She started on guitar as a teenager, formed a rock band at 15, and worked through Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, and Joni Mitchell before discovering jazz through Pat Metheny, whose genre-blending style became her central influence, followed by George Benson, John McLaughlin, and John Scofield. She studied at Santiago's Projazz Institute, made her first recorded appearance on the 2005 compilation Navidad en Jazz, and by her late teens was already a working musician on the Chilean scene.

Meza self-released her debut album, Skylark, recorded at Estudio Hannover in Santiago on October 10 and 11, 2007, with a Chilean quintet including saxophonist Claudio Rubio and trumpeter Sebastián Jordán. A second album, Retrato, followed in 2009, recorded that July at Santiago's Instituto Chileno-Norteamericano. Later that year, at 23, she relocated to New York and enrolled at The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, graduating in 2013 after studying guitar and improvisation with Peter Bernstein, Vic Juris, Sam Yahel, Steve Cardenas, and Gil Goldstein. Her third album, Prisma (2013), was co-produced with pianist Aaron Goldberg, with arrangements shared between Meza and bassist Pablo Menares.

Meza became a fixture of the New York scene through two ongoing collaborations: trombonist Ryan Keberle's band Catharsis, which she joined for its 2014 debut Into the Zone and stayed with through 2024's Music Is Connection, and pianist Fabian Almazan's ensembles, beginning as a guest on 2014's Rhizome (credited on four of its nine tracks) and becoming a full member of his electroacoustic sextet Alcanza, appearing across the entirety of its self-titled 2017 album on voice and guitar. In October 2014 she appeared with Ryan Keberle & Catharsis on NPR's Tiny Desk Concert series. Her fourth album, Traces (2016, Sunnyside), produced with Matt Pierson and featuring Shai Maestro on piano, Matt Penman on bass, and Kendrick Scott on drums, won two Independent Music Awards (Best Adult Contemporary Album and Best Latin Song for "Para Volar") and established her as a Rising Star in both the guitar and female-vocalist categories of the DownBeat Critics Poll. The following year, at Munich's BMW Welt Jazz Award, she won the Audience Prize.

In April 2018, Pat Metheny selected Meza to perform and serve as musical director for his NEA Jazz Masters induction ceremony at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., a rare honor for a musician still in her early thirties. Around the same period she guested on Israeli bassist Or Bareket's second album as a leader, 33 (2019, Enja/Yellowbird), contributing vocals and guitar to two of its ten tracks. Her fifth album, Ámbar, followed on May 31, 2019, released on Sony Music Masterworks and built around The Nectar Orchestra, a chamber-jazz ensemble co-conceived with bassist and arranger Noam Wiesenberg, with Ziv Ravitz among the musicians she has separately recorded alongside in this period (Ravitz's own 2019 leader date No Man Is An Island).

Meza's sixth album, Portal (2025, GroundUP Music), is her first composed entirely of original material, written during the pandemic and through her pregnancy and the birth of her child. She produced it with Shai Maestro, who also plays keyboards, alongside drummer Ofri Nehemya and harpist Margaret Davis, with guest appearances from vocalists Gretchen Parlato and Becca Stevens, pianist Gadi Lehavi, and spoken-word artist Faumelisa Manquepillán. She continues to perform internationally and teaches at Stanford Jazz Workshop and the Centrum jazz program.

Meza sings largely without words, treating her voice as a horn-like melodic instrument inside jazz harmony while drawing on the Chilean and broader Latin American folk repertoire (the zamba and Argentine songbook run through both 33's "Zamba de Argamonte" and her own catalog). As a guitarist she works from the vocabulary of Pat Metheny, George Benson, John McLaughlin, and John Scofield, often accompanying her own singing rather than functioning as a separate soloist. The New York Times praised her "appealing combination of lightness and depth," and she has drawn comparisons in the jazz press to fellow vocalist-instrumentalists working across the jazz and Latin American traditions.