Elena Pinderhughes was born in 1995 in Berkeley, California, to professor and activist parents, and grew up there with her older brother, the pianist Samora Pinderhughes, who became her first and main teacher. She was drawn to the flute at four, after a concert of Venezuelan music, and began playing and singing at about seven. From ages eight to eighteen she studied flute and voice, with a focus on jazz and classical music, at the Young Musicians Choral Orchestra academy in the East Bay, where its executive director, Geechi Taylor, was her mentor. She also played in the San Francisco Youth Symphony Orchestra and the Grammy Band, and the Bay Area musicians John Santos and Howard Wiley took an active interest in her development. In 2013 she was named a Presidential Scholar and then moved to New York to attend the Manhattan School of Music.

Her recording career began early. She and her brother made Catch 22, an album recorded when she was nine and he was thirteen, around 2005, and at ten she played Latin jazz flute in the HBO special The Music in Me. A 2011 to 2012 release by the SFJAZZ High School All-Star Orchestra lists her among its players. In New York she was drawn into the jazz scene around Ambrose Akinmusire, the trumpeter Christian Scott (who now performs as Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah) and Terri Lyne Carrington. She played flute on two tracks of Akinmusire's The Imagined Savior Is Far Easier to Paint (Blue Note, March 10, 2014) and on four tracks of Carrington's The Mosaic Project: Love and Soul (Concord, August 7, 2015), taking a solo on one of them. The Guardian reviewed a 2014 London concert by Scott's band and called her one of the most exciting jazz flautists to appear in years.

That relationship produced her first widely noticed record. Stretch Music, released by Scott on Ropeadope on September 18, 2015, carries the subtitle (Introducing Elena Pinderhughes); her flute is credited on the album and she is featured on two of its eleven tracks. In 2016 DownBeat's Critics Poll named her the top Rising Star flutist, and that October she performed in Common's NPR Tiny Desk concert at the White House, alongside Robert Glasper, Bilal, Karriem Riggins, Derrick Hodge and Keyon Harrold. She is featured on "Red Wine" on Common's Black America Again (Def Jam, 2016). In September 2016 she was entering her final year at the Manhattan School of Music and had been signed to SRP Music Group for more than a year, with a debut album as a leader still ahead of her.

Over the next decade she became a first-call flutist and singer for bandleaders in jazz, hip-hop and R&B alike. For Scott she played on the 2017 trilogy Diaspora, Ruler Rebel and The Emancipation Procrastination (flute on six of Diaspora's eleven tracks and six of The Emancipation Procrastination's twelve), then on Ancestral Recall (2019) and Axiom (2020). She plays flute and sings on "The Time" and plays flute on "Swisha Suite" on the 2018 album August Greene, by the trio of Common, Glasper and Riggins, and she appears on records by Lupe Fiasco, Childish Gambino (3.15.20, 2020), Terrace Martin, Victoria Monét (Jaguar II, 2023) and Kandace Springs. On the jazz side she appears on Billy Childs's Acceptance (2020), Immanuel Wilkins's The 7th Hand (2022), Carrington's New Standards Vol. 1 (2022), Ben Wendel's All One (2023), Milton + Esperanza by Milton Nascimento and Esperanza Spalding (2024), Gerald Clayton's Ones & Twos (2025) and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson's Ananta: Spirit of Coltrane (Impulse!, 2026). Her own singles include "Get Away" (2022) and "Dancing in the Rain" (2022, with DAP The Contract).

In September 2023 she performed A Diaspora Journey, a five-part suite, with the Beninese guitarist Lionel Loueke at the Monterey Jazz Festival, and she also played in Herbie Hancock's headlining set there. She has also performed with Vijay Iyer, Joshua Redman, Carlos Santana and Josh Groban. Berklee's Signature Series presented her with a student septet on October 11, 2023, at Cafe 939 in Boston, and she was living in Los Angeles as of September 2023. On August 4, 2024 she played the Newport Jazz Festival alongside Braxton Cook.

Her debut album as a leader, i hope you feel it too, came out on October 23, 2026, on the Fluture label: twelve tracks that put her flute and voice at the center. It was preceded by the singles "life goes on" (with Immanuel Wilkins), "ring ring" and "a rose in bloom"; Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah appears on "charm" and Samora Pinderhughes on "on the wind." NPR's All Things Considered ran an interview with her about the record on October 26, 2026. Dates announced for early November 2026 included the Blue Note in New York (November 2 and 3), Judson's Live in Orlando (November 6) and the Vermont Jazz Center in Brattleboro (November 7).

Pinderhughes plays flute and sings, sometimes both on the same piece, and she has said she wants jazz to feel closer to dancing and everyday life than to preservation. Her own music, as described around her debut, keeps the harmony and improvisation of jazz while taking its movement and directness from R&B and neo-soul; in 2016 she named James Blake, Frank Ocean and Drake as inspirations and said she planned to add electronic 808 kick drums to her sound. Her formation was jazz and classical: the Young Musicians Choral Orchestra academy, years of lessons with her brother Samora, and a New York apprenticeship in the bands of Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah, Ambrose Akinmusire and Terri Lyne Carrington. The same flute-and-voice approach carries into hip-hop sessions with Common and Robert Glasper, which is why her credits run from Blue Note and Impulse! releases to Def Jam. Critics noticed her early: The Guardian praised her in 2014, and DownBeat's Critics Poll ranked her the leading Rising Star flutist in 2016. English Wikipedia describes her as an American jazz flutist, singer and composer.