Rimona Francis is a jazz vocalist best known for a specific and, for its time, unusual technique: vocalise, using her voice as a horn substitute rather than a lyric instrument. Around 1967 she met arranger and multi-instrumentalist Stu Hacohen; they married and became a lasting musical partnership. Their first joint recording, a Kol Israel radio version of Mattityahu Shelem's song "Shibolet BaSade," had Francis singing vocalise well enough — recreating jazz horn solos by Charlie Parker and Clifford Brown note for note — that friends nicknamed her "the trumpet." The National Library of Israel's catalog records for her recordings consistently use the authority heading "Francis, Rimona, 1945–," which is the strongest available source for her birth year, though it is a library catalog convention rather than a biographical account.

That vocalise approach became the basis of two 1969 albums: Rimona Francis With Stu Hacohen's Orchestra (Israphon), marketed explicitly as "Jazz Vocalise," on which she is the featured vocalist with Hacohen's orchestra backing and arranging; and Badabada... (Hed-Arzi), a second, more Latin and Afro-Cuban-facing record from the same year, co-credited to both of them. The couple toured with other Israeli jazz musicians of the era, reportedly including Albert Piamenta, performing mainly at the Tzavta club and on kibbutzim to introduce jazz to Israeli audiences. Dizzy Gillespie met them during a visit to Israel and reportedly encouraged their mid-1970s move to the United States; while there, Francis appeared as a guest — vocals, ARP Solina string-ensemble synthesizer, electric piano — on bassist Miroslav Vitous's 1976 album Majesty Music (Arista Records), and separately recorded her own self-titled solo album for the German jazz label MPS, tracked in New York in October 1977 and released in 1978, with a band including pianist Jasper van't Hof, guitarist Barry Finnerty and saxophonist Leszek Żądło, produced by Joachim Ernst Berendt.

The couple returned to Israel in the late 1980s. Independent biographical material about Francis apart from her connection to Hacohen is thin — nearly every available source discusses her through the lens of "Stu Hacohen's wife and collaborator," a discography listing, or a record-collector description, rather than an interview or journalistic profile of her specifically. Stu Hacohen died in August 2006; no parallel information — death notice, obituary, or any dated activity — exists for Francis after that point, and her current living status could not be confirmed.

Francis's signature is the vocalise technique she and Hacohen developed together: using her voice to double or replace a jazz horn line rather than sing conventional lyrics, drawing on Charlie Parker and Clifford Brown solos as direct source material. That approach, set against Hacohen's Bulgarian-and-Romani-inflected arranging, gave her recorded work a distinct identity within late-1960s Israeli jazz — a scat/vocalise tradition applied to material that was itself already a fusion of jazz and Balkan folk rhythm.