Ingrid Jensen was born January 12, 1966, and raised on Vancouver Island in and around Nanaimo, British Columbia. Her mother, Karen, was a classically trained pianist who had studied at the University of British Columbia before turning to jazz; her father, Helge, a Danish-born electrician with perfect pitch, played accordion at home. Jensen and her younger sister Christine, who became a saxophonist, composer and bandleader in her own right, grew up surrounded by both classical and jazz records. Ingrid started on trumpet in elementary school, attended Malaspina College in Nanaimo, and won a scholarship to Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she studied with Tom Harrell, Bob Brookmeyer, Hal Galper and Bobby Shew and graduated in 1989.

After Berklee, Jensen split time between Europe and New York, co-founding the busking ensemble Jazz Rainbow Coalition and playing New York subway platforms while building a career. She toured with the Vienna Art Orchestra and, in 1991, at 25, took a teaching post at the Bruckner Conservatory in Linz, Austria, becoming its youngest faculty member; she held the position through 1994 while also working alongside trumpeter Art Farmer. In 1995 she won first prize at the Carmine Caruso International Jazz Trumpet Solo Competition.

Everything accelerated in 1994. Jensen signed to the German label Enja Records and joined DIVA, the all-woman big band founded that same year (the group sponsored her U.S. work visa). Her debut as a leader, Vernal Fields (Enja, 1995), recorded with George Garzone and Steve Wilson on saxophones, Bruce Barth on piano, Larry Grenadier on bass and Lenny White on drums, won the Juno Award for Best Mainstream Jazz Album at the 1996 ceremony. Two more Enja albums followed, Here on Earth (1997) and Higher Grounds (1999). Alongside her own records, Jensen spent roughly the next decade and a half, from 1994 to 2012, in the trumpet and flugelhorn section of the Maria Schneider Orchestra, playing on Concert in the Garden (2004), which won the Grammy Award for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album, and Sky Blue (2007), nominated in the same category. The Grammy in the large-ensemble categories is awarded to the credited bandleader rather than to individual section players, so neither record made Jensen herself a Grammy nominee, but both are full-album credits (no track restriction) confirmed directly on Schneider's own release data.

Jensen's own catalog shifted toward smaller, self-directed projects in the 2000s. Now as Then (Justin Time, 2003) introduced her trio Project O, with pianist Gary Versace and drummer Jon Wikan, and At Sea (ArtistShare, 2005) was her first album funded through the ArtistShare fan-subscription model, with guitarist Lage Lund and pianist Geoffrey Keezer. In 2004 she married Wikan, a drummer she had met on the New York scene; the couple settled in Westchester County, New York, raised a daughter, Karina, and in 2018 opened Sing Sing Kill Brewery, a farm brewery and live-music venue in Ossining, New York. With Wikan, her sister Christine Jensen on saxophone and Swedish pianist Maggi Olin, Jensen co-founded the international quintet Nordic Connect, which recorded Flurry (ArtistShare, 2007) and Spirals (ArtistShare, 2011).

A second long-running big-band association began around 2002, when Jensen joined Darcy James Argue's Secret Society as a founding trumpet-section member, a chair she still holds. She is a full-album credit on Infernal Machines (New Amsterdam, 2009, Grammy-nominated for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album, 2011 ceremony) and Real Enemies (New Amsterdam, 2016, nominated in the same category in 2017), and takes a featured solo on "Builders" from Brooklyn Babylon (New Amsterdam, 2013, also nominated, 2014 ceremony). On the band's most recent record, Dynamic Maximum Tension (Nonesuch, 2023, nominated in 2024), she splits the lead trumpet chair with Brandon Lee, playing on seven of the eleven tracks. As with the Schneider albums, these nominations belong formally to Argue as the credited artist. Jensen's other notable ensemble credit is Terri Lyne Carrington's The Mosaic Project (Concord, 2011), on which she plays trumpet, flugelhorn and electronic effects; the album won the Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Album in 2012, again as a Carrington-credited award. In 2017 Jensen survived a physical assault during an attempted robbery; she has spoken publicly, in a 2018 Berklee alumni-magazine profile, about using brainspotting therapy in her recovery and returning to full touring and teaching.

Jensen's later work has run in several directions at once: intimate duo and trio records (Infinitude, Whirlwind, 2016, with Christine Jensen and guitarist Ben Monder; Invisible Sounds: For Kenny Wheeler, Whirlwind, 2018, a duo with saxophonist Steve Treseler paying tribute to the trumpeter Kenny Wheeler; United, 2016, with singer Dena DeRose and guitarist Peter Bernstein); the all-star quintet Artemis, which she co-founded around 2017 with pianist Renee Rosnes, releasing Artemis (Blue Note, 2020), In Real Time (2023) and Arboresque (2025) and taking DownBeat's Jazz Group of the Year award three years running (2023-2025); and a run of co-billed collaborations including Blauw (2022, with Dutch pianist Marius van den Brink, bassist Doug Weiss and drummer Jeff "Tain" Watts), Love Letters (Mighty Quinn, 2023, a genuinely co-billed quartet with guitarist Roni Ben-Hur, bassist Ugonna Okegwo and drummer Jason Tiemann), Inner Voice (2024, with singer Júlia Karosi and pianist Kristjan Randalu), and Civil Disobedience (Blue Frog, 2026, a co-led quintet with saxophonist Donny McCaslin, pianist Bruce Barth, bassist David Ambrosio and drummer Victor Lewis). Her latest album under her own name alone is Landings (Newvelle Records, 2026). She has taught at the University of Michigan, the Peabody Institute, Purchase College and The New School, and is current jazz-trumpet faculty at Manhattan School of Music; the Jazz Journalists Association named her its 2019 Trumpeter of the Year.

Critics consistently reach for the same paradox to describe Jensen: a trumpeter capable of blistering, hard-bop-derived technique who plays with what one Berklee profile called a "warm, breathy, vocal quality," closer to a singer's phrasing than a typical brass attack. The New York Times called her "as versatile as she is vigorous." She has cited long practice with Indian tanpura drones and metronome work at varied subdivisions as the technical foundation for her relaxed, unhurried phrasing even at fast tempos, crediting her rhythmically exacting husband and duo partner Jon Wikan with helping refine it. She plays custom Monette trumpets built by David Monette, using interchangeable mouthpieces to vary her tone rather than switching between trumpet and flugelhorn as often as she once did. She has topped or placed near the top of DownBeat's critics' poll in the trumpet category repeatedly and was named the Jazz Journalists Association's 2019 Trumpeter of the Year. Her career has run two parallel tracks without favoring either: section work inside some of the most acclaimed large jazz ensembles of the past three decades (Maria Schneider, Darcy James Argue, DIVA), and an increasingly personal small-group and duo output built around family and long-standing partnerships, from Nordic Connect to Artemis to the Kenny Wheeler tribute record with Steve Treseler.