Emily Remler was born on September 18, 1957, in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, and started playing guitar at ten. Her first listening was rock guitar, Jimi Hendrix and Johnny Winter among it, and her first instrument was her brother's Gibson ES-330. At the Berklee College of Music in the 1970s she turned to jazz and to the guitarists she kept as models for the rest of her career: Charlie Christian, Wes Montgomery, Herb Ellis, Pat Martino and Joe Pass. Montgomery mattered most. Her boyfriend of the time, the guitarist Steve Masakowski, remembered her working for hours on his thumb technique and his octave playing.

After Berklee she settled in New Orleans and worked blues and jazz clubs with groups such as Four Play and Little Queenie and the Percolators. In 1978 Herb Ellis introduced her to the audience at the Concord Jazz Festival as the new superstar of guitar, and in 1981 she began recording for Concord. Her first album as a leader, Firefly, was recorded in April 1981 at Coast Recorders in San Francisco with Hank Jones, bassist Bob Maize and drummer Jake Hanna, with Carl E. Jefferson producing; the same year she appeared on the Clayton Brothers' It's All in the Family. In 1981 she also married the Jamaican pianist Monty Alexander; the marriage ended in 1984. From 1981 to 1982 she played in the Los Angeles company of the Duke Ellington revue Sophisticated Ladies, and she toured for several years with Astrud Gilberto.

Five more Concord albums followed, all produced by Jefferson. Take Two (recorded June 1982 in New York and credited to the Emily Remler Quartet) paired her with pianist James Williams, bassist Don Thompson and drummer Terry Clarke. Transitions (October 1983, released in 1984) and Catwalk (August 1984, released in 1985) used a quartet without piano, with trumpeter John D'earth, bassist Eddie Gómez and drummer Bob Moses, and Catwalk was the first of her records to consist entirely of her own compositions. In August 1985 she recorded Together with Larry Coryell, a direct-to-two-track guitar duet date of standards, two Coryell originals and a Martino blues, and Leonard Feather called it the best guitar duo album of the year. She was named Guitarist of the Year in Down Beat magazine's international poll in 1985 and played that year's guitar festival at Carnegie Hall. She also appeared on other leaders' Concord sessions, among them Ray Brown's Soular Energy with Gene Harris, and on Rosemary Clooney's Rosemary Clooney Sings the Music of Jimmy Van Heusen (1986).

Her last Concord album, East to Wes (recorded May 1988 in New York with Hank Jones, Buster Williams and Marvin "Smitty" Smith), was a tribute to Montgomery built around her title composition. In 1988 she was artist-in-residence at Duquesne University, and in 1989 Berklee gave her its Distinguished Alumni award. She made two instructional videos, Bebop and Swing Guitar and Advanced Jazz and Latin Improvisation, which came out in 1990. Her final studio project, This Is Me (Justice Records, released October 19, 1990), was a larger production with keyboards, programming and Brazilian percussionists, and it moved toward jazz-pop; David Benoit, Russ Freeman, Romero Lubambo and Duduka Da Fonseca were among the players.

Remler passed away on May 4, 1990, in Sydney, Australia, at the age of 32, while on tour in Australia. Heart failure was reported as the cause of her death. She had lived for years with opioid use disorder, which is believed to have contributed. She is buried at New Montefiore Cemetery in New York. Her death brought a run of tributes: the two Just Friends albums on Justice Records (1990 and 1991), David Benoit's composition "6-String Poet," a chapter in Leslie Gourse's 1995 book Madame Jazz, Sheryl Bailey's 2010 album A New Promise, and Fumika Asari's Thanks for Emily (2023). The live set Cookin' at the Queens, taken from two Las Vegas radio broadcasts she played at the Four Queens in 1984 and 1988, came out on Resonance Records in 2024, her first release under her own name in 34 years, and a documentary, Firefly: The Emily Remler Story, is slated for 2027.

Remler built her sound on Wes Montgomery's example: a warm hollow-body tone, thumb picking, octave melodies and a relaxed, swinging lilt. She said she wanted to be remembered for good compositions, memorable guitar playing and her contributions as a woman in music, and added that the music itself was everything. Critics heard her moving out of that debt. Scott Yanow wrote that Take Two still showed a player in the Montgomery vein with flashes of her own personality, and that by Transitions she was leaving behind the early Montgomery and Herb Ellis influence; the Penguin Guide to Jazz heard in East to Wes a harder tone and more fragmented solo lines than Montgomery's, though just as lucid. Drummer Bob Moses said she swung harder and simpler than most and never rushed to show she was a virtuoso. She wrote much of her own book, including "East to Wes," "Mocha Spice" and "Carenia," drew on bossa nova (she kept a nylon-string guitar for it) and Latin rhythms as well as bebop, and on her last record reached toward electric jazz-pop. Younger guitarists have cited her directly, among them Sheryl Bailey, who first saw her play at the University of Pittsburgh Jazz Festival in 1984.