Dominique Fils-Aimé was born on July 10, 1984, in Montreal, and grew up there in a family that had immigrated from Haiti. In 2015 she reached the semi-final of the third season of the Quebec television singing competition La Voix, where she was eliminated by Matt Holubowski. The same year she released her first EP, The Red, independently (December 2015), writing it and co-producing it herself. At the EP's release an old friend, Kevin Annocque, told her he was leaving his job to start a label for under-represented soul artists in Montreal. Although an established label was courting her at the same time, she chose to start with him, and Ensoul Records, which Annocque co-founded with Fabien Rousseau, has released all of her albums since.

Rather than begin with a single record, she proposed a trilogy of albums that would work like a thesis on African-American music, one era per album. Nameless (February 2, 2018) took the blues and slavery as its subject and was inspired in part by Maya Angelou's poem "Still I Rise"; it opens and closes with unaccompanied versions of "Strange Fruit" and "Feeling Good," and it led to two sold-out concerts at the Montreal International Jazz Festival that year. Stay Tuned! (February 22, 2019) turned to the jazz era and the civil rights struggle. Jacques Roy produced and engineered it and played bass on it, recording at Studios Opus in L'Assomption, Quebec. The album won the Félix for jazz album of the year at the 2019 ADISQ gala, was shortlisted for the 2019 Polaris Music Prize, was named one of CBC's 19 best Canadian albums of 2019, and won the 2020 Juno Award for Vocal Jazz Album of the Year. A European edition followed late in 2019, along with a first sold-out tour of France.

The trilogy closed with Three Little Words (February 12, 2021), a soul album in which every song title is three words long. It earned her a second Polaris shortlist place in 2021, and in its first weeks it reached number one in album sales in Quebec and number two in Canada. In 2022 she and Samuel Laflamme were nominated at the Quebec Cinema Awards for best original music in a documentary, for the film Alone (Seuls). In 2023 she took part in an all-star recording of Serena Ryder's charity single "What I Wouldn't Do" for Kids Help Phone.

Our Roots Run Deep (September 22, 2023) opened a second trilogy, built around nature as a metaphor for personal growth. It won the 2024 Juno Award for Vocal Jazz Album of the Year, her second, and the Félix for jazz album of the year at the 2024 ADISQ gala, and it was longlisted for the 2024 Polaris Music Prize. Her concert at the Montreal International Jazz Festival on June 29, 2024, was recorded and released in 2025 as her first live album. Her fifth studio album, My World Is the Sun, followed on February 20, 2026, as the second chapter of the new trilogy, and was longlisted for the 2026 Polaris Music Prize.

Her stage work has taken her to the Blue Note in New York and in Los Angeles, the Monterey Jazz Festival, Jazz à Vienne (opening for Jamie Cullum) and the North Sea Jazz Festival. In Europe she has opened for Melody Gardot, Diana Krall and Ibrahim Maalouf, and in Toronto she opened for Allison Russell at Koerner Hall. As of 2026 she is Montreal-based and is supporting the new album with a tour of Europe, Canada and the United States.

Fils-Aimé sings in a warm, supple alto and often builds a song from very little, a single guitar, a looped vocal or her voice alone. She writes nearly all of her own material, and her records move between jazz, blues, soul and R&B rather than settling in one of them, which is why catalogues file the same albums under soul and R&B while the Juno Awards, the ADISQ gala and the jazz festivals treat her as a vocal jazz artist. She has said she could not choose a single style to represent her, so the trilogy format let each album take on one era's sound. She has been described as drawing on soul icons such as Billie Holiday, Etta James and Nina Simone, and she says she grew up on the music of B.B. King, Erykah Badu and Lauryn Hill; Bob Marley's "Three Little Birds" is another touchstone. Critics have called her work a blend of vocal jazz, R&B and soul with an earthy, organic character, and her official biography describes it as sitting at the crossroads of jazz, soul and blues.