Angela Tomasa Bofill was born in New York City on May 2, 1954, to a Cuban father and a Puerto Rican mother, and grew up in the Bronx. She sang in New York City's All City Chorus, the ensemble that drew the strongest high-school voices from all five boroughs, graduated from Hunter College High School in 1972, and took a Bachelor of Music from the Manhattan School of Music in 1976. She studied opera, and she taught voice.

Her first professional work was not as a featured singer. She sang with Ricardo Marrero & The Group, the New York Latin jazz outfit, and she worked with the Dance Theatre of Harlem in three roles at once: singer, writer and arranger. Her earliest traceable commercial vocal credit is a 1976 one, on "California Strut," a track buried on The Walter Murphy Band's A Fifth of Beethoven (Private Stock), the album whose title instrumental later became a Saturday Night Fever fixture. She was 22.

The credit that says the most about her, though, is from the following year. Ricardo Marrero and The Group's Time (Vaya Records, 1977) carries an arranging credit for Bofill on its closing track, a reading of Eugene McDaniels' "Feel Like Making Love" with Dave Valentin soloing on flute. Valentin, the flutist on that session, was the friend who took her to Dave Grusin and Larry Rosen, who had just founded GRP Records. They signed her.

Angie, released November 1, 1978 on GRP through Arista, opened not with its single but with "Under the Moon and Over the Sky," a five-minute Bofill composition. Four of the album's eight songs were hers, and she is credited with the choral arrangements as well. Grusin arranged and conducted; the band included Eric Gale, Steve Gadd, Buddy Williams, Ralph MacDonald, Michael Brecker and Dave Valentin, with Patti Austin and Gwen Guthrie on backing vocals and the Dance Theater of Harlem Choral Ensemble behind them. The record reached No. 47 on the Billboard 200, No. 20 R&B and No. 5 on the jazz chart, and its single, Gwen Guthrie and Patrick Grant's "This Time I'll Be Sweeter," reached No. 23 R&B.

Angel of the Night followed on October 10, 1979, same label, same producers, recorded at A&R Studios with liner notes by Pete Hamill. Four of eight songs were hers again, including "I Try," which became the song most closely identified with her, and "The Voyage." It reached No. 34 pop, No. 10 R&B and No. 2 on the jazz chart. On June 20, 1980 she headlined a sold-out Newport Jazz Festival date at Avery Fisher Hall with Onaje Allan Gumbs as musical director, Sammy Figueroa on percussion, a nine-piece band, a 24-voice choir, and Steve Khan and Eddie Daniels guesting. She was two years past an unknown debut, and coverage of the period described her as one of the first Latina singers to find real footing in both the R&B and jazz markets.

Arista moved her onto its main roster in 1981 with Clive Davis as executive producer and Narada Michael Walden producing. Something About You (October 28, 1981) reached No. 61 pop, No. 13 R&B and No. 4 jazz, with Randy Jackson on bass and Tower of Power on horns, and Earl Klugh co-writing "You Should Know By Now." Too Tough, released January 1983, became her best-selling album at No. 40 pop and No. 6 R&B, with the title track spending four weeks at No. 2 on the Billboard Dance chart and reaching No. 5 R&B. That record is the one that complicates the usual account of a jazz singer being reshaped for radio: Bofill is credited as co-producer alongside Walden, as co-arranger of the rhythm section with Francisco Centeno, and as writer or co-writer of all five songs on side two. Boz Scaggs sang "Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing" with her on side one.

Teaser arrived nine months later, on October 27, 1983, produced by Walden and Denny Diante with a Mick Rock cover, Michel Colombier and David Sancious on keyboards and Michael Gibbs arranging strings. It reached No. 81 pop, No. 20 R&B and No. 21 jazz, and yielded "I'm On Your Side" at No. 20 R&B. Its side two also carried "You're a Special Part of Me," written by Bofill with Loree Gold, which she and Johnny Mathis recorded as a duet the following year.

The rest of the 1980s moved her through producers rather than labels. Let Me Be the One (1984) was made with David Frank and Mic Murphy of The System and reached No. 39 R&B. Tell Me Tomorrow (1985) was produced by George Duke, who played every keyboard on it, and reached No. 53 R&B. Intuition, her only Capitol album, came in 1988 with Norman Connors among its arrangers and mixers and with Bofill herself holding a mixing credit; her reading of "I Just Wanna Stop" reached No. 11 R&B. I Wanna Love Somebody followed on Jive in 1993 at No. 51 R&B, and Love in Slow Motion on Shanachie in 1996. Live from Manila appeared on Black Angel Productions on April 6, 2006.

Three months before that live album, on January 10, 2006, Bofill suffered a stroke that paralyzed her left side. She had no health insurance, and a benefit concert was staged for her on March 11, 2006 at the Bergen Performing Arts Center in Englewood, New Jersey. A second stroke in July 2007 took more of her speech and mobility. The singing voice did not come back.

What came instead was The Angela Bofill Experience, built in 2010 by her manager Rich Engel. Maysa and Phil Perry sang her catalogue while Bofill, unable to stand, sat on stage and narrated her own life between the songs. The shows sold out. Asked about it by the Washington Post in January 2011, she said: "No sing no more and still people come." TV One devoted an episode of Unsung to her in 2012, and in 2011 Maysa recorded "I Try" for her own album Motions of Love with Bofill appearing on the track.

She was inducted into the Women Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2023. She passed away on June 13, 2024 at her daughter's home in Vallejo, California, at 70. A funeral mass was held on June 28, 2024 at St. Dominic's Catholic Church in Benicia, California.

Bofill's voice was a wide, warm contralto-to-soprano instrument trained in a conservatory, and she used the whole of it: the long-form title suite on her debut asks for very different things than the dance singles she cut five years later. What kept her recognisable across that range was phrasing rooted in jazz rather than in soul or pop convention, which is why her records charted on the jazz survey and the R&B survey at the same time rather than on one or the other.

Her writing is the part that gets undersold. On the two GRP albums she supplied half the material, including her two most durable songs, "I Try" and "Under the Moon and Over the Sky," and both of those are built on harmonic movement and open forms that a straight R&B writer would not have reached for. She also carried real arranging skill into every room she worked in: choral arrangements on her own debut, rhythm arrangements on Too Tough, and, before either, an arranging credit on somebody else's Latin jazz album.

The Latin thread runs underneath all of it. Her earliest sessions were with Ricardo Marrero and Louie Ramirez, she recorded Spanish-language versions of her own songs ("Amor Celestial," "Estoy Esperando Por El Amor"), and she was widely described as one of the first Latina singers to succeed in the American R&B and jazz markets at once. Her strongest influence on the field is visible downstream: Will Downing, Maysa, Jennifer Holliday and Marion Meadows all recorded her material.