Ladyva was born Vanessa Sabrina Gnaegi on December 8, 1988, in Ipsach, in the canton of Bern, Switzerland, and worked under the name Vanessa G before settling on her current stage name. She began playing piano at 14, drawn to the great boogie-woogie pianists, and two years later started performing with her brother, Pascal Silva. Her official biography describes the Dominican Republic as her second homeland, and a 2021 portrait of her was taken at the piano in her garden there. Her first album, The Boogie Woogie Lady (2009), appeared under the name Vanessa G: a 13-track CD with drummer Charlie Weibel and guitarist Heinz Affolter that sets boogie-woogie readings of "Don't Be Cruel," "Rock Around the Clock," and "Honky Tonk Train Blues" next to Michael Jackson's "Earth Song" and a boogie "Für Elise."

The step up from the Swiss festival circuit came in 2014 and 2015. After a run of boogie-woogie festivals in Germany in 2014, she was invited by the promoter Rocco Buonvino to play on Jerry Lee Lewis's 80th birthday and farewell tour of the United Kingdom, at the London Palladium and Glasgow's Clyde Auditorium in September 2015. On October 16, 2015, she played live on The Late Late Show on RTÉ One in Ireland, and that November she toured Europe and appeared on Bulgarian television, including Slavi's Show. The same year she played the Cigar Awards at Boisdale of Canary Wharf in London. In May 2016 she was invited to the Boogie Woogie & Blues Spectacular hosted by the pianist and bandleader Jools Holland, and she returned to it in 2018, when Hugh Laurie was among the guests.

From 2016 she played festivals in Switzerland, France, Spain, and Germany alongside the Swiss boogie-woogie, blues, and jazz pianist Silvan Zingg, who founded the International Boogie Woogie Festival in Lugano in 2002. Their four-handed CD Beloved Boogie Woogie, with bassists Hanna Läuchli and Nuno Alexandre and drummer Valerio Felice, was presented at that festival on April 22, 2017. She followed it with her third album, 8 to the Bar (2017), a 12-track set mixing live and studio pieces that includes "Maple Leaf Rag," "Honky Tonk Train Blues," and "Great Balls of Fire." On September 13, 2017, at the Boisdale Music Awards in London, hosted by Jools Holland, she was named Best Boogie Woogie Pianist 2017. In August 2017 she played the large boogie-woogie festival at Laroquebrou in France, returning in 2022, and in November 2017 she sang "Something" with the London Concert Orchestra in the Beatles Symphonic concert at the London Coliseum.

Her recorded profile rose through video. In 2018 she appeared on the ITV daytime show Loose Women, and in 2020 her original "Quarantine Boogie" went viral on YouTube and brought her coverage in Switzerland's Blick. She issued her own composition "Ladyva's Stomp," which had already appeared on the 2016 duo album, as a single in May 2021. In 2022 YouTube presented her with its Silver Play Button for passing 100,000 subscribers, and on September 28, 2022, she won Boogie Woogie Artist of the Year at the Boisdale Music Awards. In December 2022 she performed with Kool & the Gang at the Great Pyramids of Giza in Egypt.

Her fourth album, Steam Train Boogie, came out on December 8, 2023, her 35th birthday. It is a trio record with double bassist Arno Schulz and drummer Mario von Holten, on which she plays piano and organ and sings, and its program includes "Got My Mojo Working," "Quarantine Boogie," "Ladyva's Stomp," and "Return to Blues." In 2023 she also played the La Baule Jazz Festival in France and the European Boogie-Woogie Masters, and appeared on the cover of the July 2023 issue of the magazine Jazz Time. From November 27 to 30, 2024, she was a guest on Jools Holland's autumn tour with his Rhythm & Blues Orchestra, with two nights at Symphony Hall in Birmingham and two at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Since late 2025 she has released a run of singles, several of them live with the Barcelona Big Blues Band: "Ladyva's Stomp" (November 15, 2025), "Great Balls of Fire" (December 26, 2025), and "Boogie Woogie Be With Me" (October 20, 2026). Between them came "Ladyva Live From The Royal Albert Hall" (March 6, 2026), "Sweet Georgia Brown" (June 5, 2026), and "Honky Tonk Blues" (August 14, 2026). She and the band are also featured on her brother's single "That's All Right" (February 18, 2026), and the two siblings had issued "Que Me Robes un Beso" together in 2018. A concert with the big band and Pascal Silva at the National in Bern was announced for October 30, 2026. As of September 2026 her YouTube channel had more than 190 million views. She has also warned fans publicly that AI-generated albums and fake social media accounts are circulating under her name and has asked them to trust only her official channels.

Ladyva is a boogie-woogie pianist first: a driving left hand, rolling bass figures, and a blues-and-ragtime repertoire that runs from "Honky Tonk Train Blues" and "Maple Leaf Rag" to her own pieces such as "Ladyva's Stomp," "Quarantine Boogie," and "Steam Train Boogie." Her sets also carry the Jerry Lee Lewis and early rock and roll songbook ("Great Balls of Fire," "Rock Around the Clock") and swing standards such as "Sweet Georgia Brown," and she sings as well as plays. English, German, and Italian Wikipedia all call her a boogie-woogie, blues, and jazz pianist, and Discogs files all four of her albums under Blues, two of them also under Jazz, with Boogie Woogie as the style. The jazz side shows up in the festivals she plays (a 2016 Jazz Ascona festival sampler CD, the La Baule Jazz Festival in 2023, and Germany's Siegburg Boogie & Jazz Night) and in the big-band setting of her work with the Barcelona Big Blues Band. Her reputation is that of a roots-piano entertainer with a very large online audience rather than a modern-jazz improviser, and her best-known honors come from the British boogie-woogie and blues scene around Jools Holland. Her official biography says she was inspired by the great masters of boogie-woogie without naming them.