Chiara Civello was born in Rome on June 15, 1975, and started on piano at the age of three. She studied at the Saint Louis Music School in Rome, and at 17 she was singing as the featured vocalist with the big band of Mario Raja before joining a group led by the drummer Roberto Gatto. An audition at Umbria Jazz won her a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she moved in 1994. In Boston she formed a jazz trio with Antonia Bennett, the daughter of Tony Bennett, and she graduated in 1998 with a Boston Jazz Society Award and a Cleo Laine Award. She is credited on two Berklee showcase compilations from those years, the 1997 collection Summa Cum Jazz and the 1998 live set from the Rencontres du Jazz de Berklee in Juan-les-Pins.

She moved to New York City in 2000. There she met the producer Russ Titelman, who made her a demo, introduced her to Ron Goldstein, the head of the Verve Music Group, and brought her together with Burt Bacharach, with whom she co-wrote "Trouble." Verve signed her, and she became the first Italian artist to record for the label. A promotional EP appeared in 2004, and in the same year she sang on the New Talent Jazz Orchestra's The Sound of New York Jazz Underground for Fresh Sound New Talent. Her first album, Last Quarter Moon, was released by Verve in 2005 and produced by Titelman. She sang, played piano, keyboards and percussion, and made the vocal and song arrangements, with a New York band that included Steve Gadd, Larry Goldings, Mike Mainieri, Jamey Haddad, Adam Rogers, Ben Street and Rob Mounsey. Daniel Jobim, grandson of Antonio Carlos Jobim, sang on it, and the record also took in songs by the Brazilian singer Rosa Passos and by Suzanne Vega.

The Space Between (2007) came out on EmArcy and was produced by Steve Addabbo and Pete Rende, with songs she wrote with the guitarist Jim Campilongo. For 7752 (2010, EmArcy) she worked with the producer Andres Levin and with the Brazilian singer Ana Carolina; the title refers to the distance between New York and Rio de Janeiro, and the guests included Jaques Morelenbaum, Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Marc Ribot and Anat Cohen. "Problemi," a song she wrote with Ana Carolina, took the Premio Multishow for best song in Brazil in 2012 in Ana Carolina's recording. That February she took part in the Sanremo Festival with "Al posto del mondo," written with Diana Tejera, and the song gave its name to her next album, released on Sony.

Canzoni (2014) turned to Italian love songs from the 1960s onward, produced by Nicola Conte with orchestral arrangements by Eumir Deodato. It brought in Gilberto Gil, Chico Buarque, Ana Carolina and Esperanza Spalding as duet guests, and it reached No. 16 on the Italian album chart. In 2018 she joined Gilberto Gil's European tour as a guest musician, and the same year she was named a Knight of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. Eclipse (2017) was produced by Marc Collin of Nouvelle Vague, who also produced Chansons (2021), a set of French standards on Kwaidan Records that includes a version of "La vie en rose" with Anat Cohen and has Dario Congedo on drums.

Her sideman and guest work includes jazz sessions as well as pop ones. She sang on Roberto Gatto's 7# (1997), on Nicola Conte's Rituals (2008), on the Italian singer Mario Biondi's Due (2011), where she is the featured lead voice on "All I Really Want," and on Till Brönner's Italia (2025), where she sings "Parole parole." She is among the guest voices on InventaRio Incontra Ivan Lins, a tribute to Ivan Lins by the group Giovanni Ceccarelli and Ferruccio Spinetti founded in 2009, which was nominated for Best MPB Album at the 2014 Latin Grammy Awards, and she sings on bassist Jimmy Haslip's Red Heat (2000) and, as a backing vocalist, on John Pizzarelli's Bossa Nova (2004).

CCCC, a collaboration with the producer Clap! Clap! (Cristiano Crisci) that mixes electronics, jazz and art-pop, was released on October 30, 2026, after the singles "Me and the Trees," "New Dimension," "A Jurnata" and "My Grief and I." She is scheduled to present it at the Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome on November 23, 2026. She played the Istanbul Jazz Festival on July 5, 2025.

Civello is a singer-songwriter first and a jazz singer second, and her records say so. AllMusic's biographer noted that she is not a full-time jazz singer or a bebop purist and that much of her Verve material sits closer to Sade, Norah Jones or Rickie Lee Jones than to Abbey Lincoln or Sheila Jordan, while adding that the jazz influence is almost always present in her pop and that she has crossed paths with Phil Woods and Mike Stern. Her piano and her phrasing come from Berklee and from the New York rhythm sections she recorded with, and her standing with jazz audiences rests on the Verve and EmArcy albums, the guest credits listed here and festival dates such as Istanbul Jazz.

The other strand is Brazilian. She has lived in the United States and in Brazil, and the bossa nova and MPB tradition of Antonio Carlos Jobim, Ivan Lins, Gal Costa and Astrud Gilberto, whom AllMusic names among her listening, runs through her songwriting and through 7752. She writes and sings in Italian, English, Portuguese, Spanish and French, and she moves between them from record to record: the English-language songwriter of Last Quarter Moon, the Rio collaborator of 7752, the interpreter of the Italian songbook on Canzoni, the French standards of Chansons, and the electronic experiments of CCCC.