Camilla Battaglia was born in Milan in 1990, the daughter of two of the most prominent independent voices in Italian jazz: pianist Stefano Battaglia and singer Tiziana Ghiglioni. Her earliest appearance on record predates her adult career by more than a decade: Discogs' release-level credits for Ghiglioni's My Essential Duke Ellington (Philology, recorded at Murec Studio, Milan, February-July 1995, released 1998) list "Camilla Battaglia" among the vocalists alongside her mother - she would have been four or five years old at the sessions, a family cameo rather than a professional engagement, and no track-level breakdown survives to say which song she appears on.

She trained first as a scholar rather than a musician, completing a philosophy degree at Milan's Università Statale in 2012. A chance studio session at nineteen changed the direction: she sang on Joy Spring (Philology, 2010), billed to "Renato Sellani Trio introducing Camilla Battaglia," alongside the veteran pianist, bassist Luciano Milanese and drummer Stefano Bagnoli. The same year she placed second in the Premio Internazionale Massimo Urbani (PIMU), a jazz competition held in Urbisaglia.

Formal jazz training followed: she graduated from Siena Jazz University in 2016 with full marks in jazz vocals, then continued on the European Jazz Master programme (EUJam, 2016-2018), studying contemporary composition and performance at Copenhagen's Rytmisk Musikkonservatorium, Berlin's Jazz-Institut Berlin (JIB) and the Conservatorium van Amsterdam - directing the JIB Big Band in Berlin in 2017 as her first outing as composer-conductor. She now teaches improvisation and repertoire at Siena Jazz University, the school that trained her.

Her leader catalog opens in earnest with Tomorrow-2more Rows of Tomorrows (Dodicilune, 2016), a quintet record with American saxophonist David Binney as featured guest (alto sax and vocals) alongside guitarist Roberto Cecchetto, bassist Andrea Lombardini on electric bass and electronics, tenor saxophonist Nicolò Ricci, trombonist Federico Pierantoni and drummer Bernardo Guerra - Discogs-tagged Jazz/Contemporary Jazz, and ranked among Italy's best 100 albums of the year by the magazine Jazz It. EMIT: Rotator Tenet (Dodicilune, 2018), a set of entirely original compositions, brought American trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire in as featured soloist and drew a three-and-a-half-star review in DownBeat; Lombardini again played electric bass and electronics. In 2019 she was selected for "Nuova Generazione Jazz" at that year's European Jazz Conference.

Her work since has moved toward solo and large-ensemble extremes. Perpetual Possibility (Hout Records, recorded 2020-2022 at Virtual Sound Studio, produced by Andrea Lombardini), a solo piece for voice and live electronics setting passages from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, was selected for Italia Music Export's PUSH2021 programme and performed on the official International Jazz Day calendar (Gradisca d'Isonzo, 2022 edition). Càlór (Parco della Musica Records, 2023), recorded in late September 2022 and presented in concert on 1 October 2022 at Rome's Casa del Jazz, is a quartet record with pianist Julius Windisch, bassist Nick Dunston and drummer Lukas Akintaya. A separate 2023 release, the cassette Camilla Battaglia Per Dei Suoni (Dei Suoni), is Discogs-tagged Electronic/Experimental/Abstract rather than Jazz - a distinct, avowedly non-jazz side release, not counted toward her jazz catalog here. Her most recent album, ELEkTRA (Ropeadope, released 22 November 2024), is a ten-track, large-ensemble suite retelling the stories of Cassandra, Electra, Aspasia and Phryne through words borrowed from Christa Wolf's Cassandra and Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own; recorded at Cicaleto Studio in Arezzo, its personnel includes violinist Anaïs Drago (also voice) and, again, Andrea Lombardini on electric bass alongside Francesco Ponticelli on double bass. The magazine Soundwall named it Album of the Year for 2024.

A duo project with her father is part of Stefano Battaglia's own current work: his own official biography names "the one in duo with his daughter Camilla" alongside a newer duo with singer Elsa Martin among the projects occupying his present. No recording of the Camilla/Stefano duo turned up in this build's research, so it is recorded here as a confirmed, current collaboration - independently corroborated on his own site, not just a shared surname - without a discography entry of its own.

Her catalog runs a genuine range, from song-based quintet jazz (Tomorrow-2more Rows of Tomorrows, EMIT: Rotator Tenet) to large-ensemble, text-driven concept works (ELEkTRA) and solo voice-and-electronics pieces (Perpetual Possibility) - organized, in her own description to Off Topic Magazine, around what happens when a jazz voice pushes past conventional song delivery into sound-design and spoken word. Literary and mythological source material recurs throughout: T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets on Perpetual Possibility, Christa Wolf's Cassandra and Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own on ELEkTRA - a compositional habit shared with her father, whose ECM albums Re: Pasolini and Pelagos are each built around a single outside literary or geographic subject in much the same way. Her instrumentation choices - a Kaosspad and live electronics threaded through otherwise acoustic jazz ensembles, a ten-piece horn-and-rhythm section on ELEkTRA - place her closer to the avant-garde and chamber-scaled wings of the current Italian scene than to a standards-repertoire vocalist.