Anat Cohen is the third Cohen sibling most jazz listeners eventually meet, alongside brothers Avishai (trumpet) and Yuval (soprano saxophone) — together the three perform as the 3 Cohens. She is related to exactly one of the two unrelated musicians named Avishai Cohen profiled elsewhere in this system: the trumpeter is her brother; the bassist is a different person entirely.

She started on clarinet at twelve and added tenor saxophone at sixteen, both at the Jaffa Conservatory in Tel Aviv. After Israeli military service (1993-1995), she spent three years at Berklee College of Music in Boston before moving to New York. There she spent roughly a decade touring with the Diva Jazz Orchestra, the all-women big band, while simultaneously working her way into Brazilian music through the Choro Ensemble and Duduka Da Fonseca's Samba Jazz Quintet — the beginning of a relationship with Brazilian music that has never left her playing since.

Her debut album as a leader, Place & Time (2005, Anzic Records), featured pianist Jason Lindner, bassist Ben Street, drummer Jeff Ballard, and her brother Avishai. Anzic Records, co-founded around this period, became a home base for much of her subsequent catalog, including Poetica (2007) and Notes from the Village (2008). The Brazilian thread deepened through Alegria De Casa (2015, with Trio Brasileiro), Outra Coisa, and Rosa dos Ventos (both 2017) — the latter two both earning Grammy nominations in 2017, for Best Latin Jazz Album and Best World Music Album respectively.

She still leads Choro Aventuroso, a quartet built around Brazilian choro with bandmates drawn from Brazil, sitting at one end of a discography that also holds the opposite extreme: the ten-piece Anat Cohen Tentet, whose 2019 album Triple Helix centers on a three-movement suite commissioned by Carnegie Hall and Chicago's Symphony Center, and earned a 2019 Grammy nomination for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album. She went smaller again with Quartetinho, a foursome in which every member doubles instruments, debuting in 2022 and following up with Quartetinho: Bloom in 2024. In 2025 she went back to family: on June 16, 2022, she reunited with Avishai and Yuval for a live concert with Germany's WDR Big Band in Cologne, arranged and conducted by Oded Lev-Ari; the recording was released in 2025 as Interaction, on Anzic Records.

The awards read almost like a typo. The Jazz Journalists Association has named her Clarinetist of the Year every year since 2007 or 2008, through 2025 — close to two decades of one instrument, one name at the top, an unusually long unbroken run for any jazz award. She has also picked up multiple JJA "Multi-Reedist of the Year" honors (2012, 2013, 2015, 2017), DownBeat "Rising Star" and top-clarinet citations across more than a decade, and the North Sea Jazz Festival's Paul Acket Award in 2013.

In late 2025 she marked her 50th birthday with a celebration show at SFJAZZ Center's Miner Auditorium in San Francisco, capping a run that also included a multi-concert stand at Jazz at Lincoln Center's Appel Room under the title "Anat Cohen: Journeys."

Cohen's playing runs on two parallel tracks that rarely fully separate: a deep, idiomatic command of Brazilian choro, developed over years inside New York's Brazilian music scene rather than picked up as an outside influence, and a post-bop jazz vocabulary built on the clarinet's older, pre-bebop jazz lineage brought fully up to date. She moves fluidly between intimate small-group settings (Choro Aventuroso, Quartetinho) and large-ensemble writing (the Tentet), which is unusual range for a single leader's catalog — most jazz musicians settle into one scale and stay there. The common thread across both ends is a warm, vocal-toned clarinet sound and a clear compositional interest in commissioned, longer-form work, as with the Triple Helix suite.