Anat Fort started classical piano at five. She fell for drummer Paul Motian's playing years before she ever met him, hearing him on old Bill Evans Trio records. She studied at William Paterson University in New Jersey, home to one of the top jazz programs in the United States, then moved to New York in 1996 to study improvisation with pianist Paul Bley and composition with Harold Seletsky. Once there, she went to every Motian gig she could find, worked her way in through his longtime bassist Ed Schuller, and eventually got Motian to agree to record with her — a genuine pursuit of a hero rather than a lucky break.

She self-produced her debut album, Peel (self-released, catalog ANAf001, 2005), a full quintet session with bassist Andreas Henze, drummer Heinrich Köbberling, guitarist Dan Nadel, and saxophonist Aaron Stewart. That Motian session finally happened in 2004, recorded in Brooklyn, and became A Long Story (ECM 1994, 2007): an album of Fort's original compositions featuring Motian on drums, clarinetist Perry Robinson, and Ed Schuller on bass. It made her the first Israeli artist to release music on ECM Records, the German label whose spare, exacting aesthetic under producer Manfred Eicher has long defined a specific strand of contemporary jazz. Playing with Motian changed how she thought about performing altogether.

She built on that with And If (ECM, 2010, recorded in Norway in February 2009), the debut of the Anat Fort Trio alongside bassist Gary Wang and German drummer Roland Schneider — a working group that has stayed together, in various configurations, for a long stretch of her career. Birdwatching (ECM, 2016) added Italian reed player Gianluigi Trovesi to the trio. She has continued to record steadily since, with Colour (Sunnyside, 2019, with the same Wang/Schneider trio), Bubbles (Hypnote Records, 2019 — a different working group entirely, with Belgian musicians Rene Hart on bass and Lieven Venken on drums rather than her regular trio), and The Berlin Sessions (Sunnyside, 2023, a 2xCD set back with Wang and Schneider, featuring covers of Billy Joel, Jerome Kern, Level 42, and Israeli composer Nurit Hirsh alongside her originals).

In 2018, Fort received Israel's Prime Minister's Award for jazz composition, and remains, as of this research, the only woman to have received it. The Anat Fort Trio was also a finalist for the BMW Welt Jazz Award in 2022, alongside the Marco Mezquida Trio.

Eighteen years after that first session with Motian, and fourteen years after his death in 2011, Fort closed the circle on August 15, 2025, with The Dreamworld of Paul Motian (Sunnyside Records), a full tribute record made with guitarist Steve Cardenas, bassist Gary Wang, and drummer Matt Wilson. The musician who once chased down gig after gig to meet her hero spent her career becoming the artist who could honor him with an album of her own.

Fort's sound is most often placed alongside ECM's own aesthetic — spare, patient, attentive to silence and space — a lineage she entered directly by becoming the label's first Israeli artist. Paul Motian and Paul Bley are her most direct, personally documented influences: Motian as the drummer she pursued and eventually recorded with, Bley as the improvisation teacher she sought out on first arriving in New York. Her writing favors original compositions built for a small, flexible trio format that can absorb a guest voice — clarinet, reeds, guitar — without losing its center, a format she has returned to across nearly two decades of ECM and Sunnyside recordings.