Battista Lena was born June 8, 1959, in Viareggio, the son of art critic, philosopher, and feminist activist Carla Lonzi. He lived in Milan until 1973, where he taught himself guitar, then moved to Rome with his mother, where he began studying jazz with guitarist Eddy Palermo.

Professionally active since the mid-1980s, Lena built his first substantial partnership with drummer Roberto Gatto, with whom he recorded five albums, including Ask (1987, with guest John Scofield) and Luna (1989). From 1991 to 1996 he took part in nearly all of trumpeter Enrico Rava's projects, in both Rava's Italian quartet, alongside Gatto and bassist Paolino Dalla Porta, and Rava's European lineup, with bassist Palle Danielsson and drummer Jon Christensen, touring extensively across Europe with both groups. The pairing produced Rava L'Opéra Va (1993, Label Bleu), a jazz reading of opera arias that won Musica Jazz magazine's readers' referendum for Best Album of 1994; Lena is Discogs-credited on guitar throughout, alongside Rava, bassist and arranger Bruno Tommaso, Danielsson, Christensen, accordionist Richard Galliano, and the Insieme Strumentale di Roma string quartet.

In 1997 Lena recorded Banda Sonora (Label Bleu), a project pairing a jazz sextet, himself on guitar, Rava on trumpet, clarinetist Gabriele Mirabassi, accordionist Gianni Coscia, bassist Enzo Pietropaoli, and drummer Marcello Di Leonardo, with the roughly fifty-piece amateur brass ensemble Banda B. Somma di Chianciano Terme. The record won a "Choc de la Musique" from the French magazine Jazzman and a four-ffff rating from Télérama, was the subject of a 1999 RAI television documentary, La Strana Storia di Banda Sonora, and was performed at festivals across Europe and in China. The following year, Germany's WDR Big Band Köln devoted a set of Euroradio recordings and concerts to his music.

Lena returned to Label Bleu in 2002 for I Cosmonauti Russi, a jazz "opera" built on poems by writer Marco Lodoli about the isolated lives of Russian cosmonauts. The double album, issued in separate Italian and French editions, again featured Rava and Mirabassi alongside singers Gianmaria Testa, Laura Betti, and Maria Pia De Vito on the Italian disc and Arthur H and Rokia Traoré on the French disc; the piece was staged at Turin's Teatro Regio, Rome's Auditorium Parco della Musica, the Todi Arte Festival, and festivals in Grenoble, Amiens, Saalfelden, Roccella Jonica, and Mannheim.

Between those large-ensemble projects, Lena also composed and arranged Mille Corde (1999, EGEA), scoring his own guitar-based compositions for a full mandolin-and-guitar orchestra, the Orchestra a Plettro Senese, with guest turns from Coscia, Mirabassi, Pietropaoli, and trumpeter Paolo Fresu. In 1996 he was also one quarter of Come Una Volta (EGEA), a co-billed quartet with Mirabassi, Coscia, and Pietropaoli that helped win Mirabassi that year's Top Jazz "best new talent" award from Musica Jazz's critics' poll.

Alongside performing, Lena has taught jazz guitar at the advanced courses of Siena Jazz and Roccella Jonica, and served as a professor of composition and jazz guitar at New York University's Florence campus from 2008 to 2012. His own projects have appeared at Umbria Jazz, the Montréal Jazz Festival, the Beijing International Jazz Festival, Saalfelden Jazzfestival, Jazz à Mulhouse, Torino Jazz Festival, and Roccella Jazz.

Lena has also built a long parallel career as a film composer, almost entirely for the films of his wife, director Francesca Archibugi, starting with her early shorts in 1982 and running through her 2025 feature Illusione. He has scored several of Paolo Virzì's films, including Ferie d'agosto (1996) and Ovosodo (1997), and composed the score for Álex de la Iglesia's Spanish film El día de la bestia (1996, released in Italy as Il giorno della bestia). In 2013 he founded his own label, Lift Music, through which he has released his own projects since, including Mi Ami? (2013) and Pofaulle Sessions Vol. 1: From Here (2020), alongside remastered reissues of his earlier catalog.

Lena's catalog runs on two parallel tracks. The first is small-group, mainstream-tradition jazz guitar, built during his 1980s-90s run with Roberto Gatto and Enrico Rava: Discogs tags nearly all of these records "Contemporary Jazz." The second is large-scale, composed concept work that pairs a jazz core with unconventional forces, an amateur brass band on Banda Sonora, a full mandolin-and-guitar orchestra on Mille Corde, a bilingual vocal ensemble on I Cosmonauti Russi, work that Discogs separately tags "Big Band." His more recent Lift Music-era recordings move toward a smoother, electronics-inflected studio sound, reflected in Discogs' "Smooth Jazz" tag on Pofaulle Sessions Vol. 1. Running underneath all of it is his parallel career scoring films for Francesca Archibugi and Paolo Virzì, which keeps a strong sense of melody and mood-setting even in his more exploratory jazz projects.