Tony Pancella was born in Chieti, in Italy's Abruzzo region, in 1959, into a family of musicians: his grandfather was a violinist, his grandmother a pianist, and his father a jazz-loving pianist himself. Pancella took up piano as a self-taught player at age six. He started performing professionally at 18 as a percussionist in a Renaissance music ensemble, then formed his own jazz group at 22. At 24 he attended a workshop with drummer Max Roach, who selected him from the full group of participants to accompany him in the workshop's closing concert.

In 1989 Pancella won First Prize in a new-jazz-talent competition organized jointly by Rome's Music Inn, RAI Radiouno and the Umbria Jazz festival, and in 1990 his group won the prize for Best New Emerging Italian Jazz Group at the 7th Forli Jazz Competition. In 1991 he traveled to New York, performed with saxophonist Virginia Mayhew, and studied privately with pianists Larry Willis and James Williams, both lasting influences on his playing. He has since performed in more than 40 countries, including the United States, Canada, Germany, Austria, Israel, France, England and Japan, at jazz festivals, clubs and theaters.

Pancella's leader discography opens with the trio record Dice (1990, Philology), with bassist Mauro Battisti and drummer Carlo Battisti, joined by guest soprano saxophonist Pierpaolo Pecoriello; the pair also recorded the duo project Tetracolors around the same period. Keep This in Mind (1998, YVP Music), billed to the Tony Pancella Basic Jazz Trio with bassist Luca Bulgarelli and drummer Marcello Di Leonardo, followed, then Different Stories (2000, YVP Music) with bassist Ulf Rodelius and drummer Pietro Iodice, featuring Italian saxophonist Tino Tracanna as a guest.

His New York studies with Larry Willis led, in 2006, to the two-piano duo album Alter Ego (Mapleshade Records); that same year Pancella contributed the original composition "Just Wait and See" to Willis's own trio record The Big Push (HighNote Records), engineered by Rudy Van Gelder. Himawari (2011, AudioniKa Records) paired him with accordionist and composer Moreno Bussoletti and the Orchestra Dell'Istituzione Sinfonica Abruzzese. Time to Take Back My Soul (2016, Orange Park Records), a trio record with bassist Aldo Vigorito and drummer Pietro Iodice, set a poem written for Pancella by English writer Martin Gray to music, read aloud on the title track.

Pancella's international sideman work includes piano on Israeli-American vocalist Daphna Levy's Late Night Journey (2014), alongside saxophonist Lew Tabackin, and on Magdalena Reising and the Blue Cafe Jazz Ensemble's Coming Home (2010). In 2009 he recorded the duo album Different Like Two Drops of Water with Israeli jazz guitarist Uri Bracha, a pairing the two took on the road to headline the Tel Aviv Jazz Festival in February 2010. His 2018 quartet record A Certain Attitude, tagged Post-Bop and Contemporary Jazz on Discogs, teamed him with German-American trumpeter Gregory Rivkin, bassist Henning Sieverts and drummer Matthias Gmelin; the same year he recorded the Ellington-and-Monk tribute duo album Duke.Monk & Viceversa (Suonare Records) with clarinetist Bepi D'Amato. Rivkin and Pancella later recorded a second duo project, Monk'Us, released February 12, 2026. Pancella also leads the Pancella/Rodelius Project, whose Special Stories (2021, AdOpen) reunited him with bassist Ulf Rodelius alongside drummer Johan Kolsut, and he appears as pianist, arranger and co-writer on Belgian vocalist Pascale Elia's And Still We Dream (2019), billed to the Tony Pancella Trio.

His most recent studio album, In Viaggio (2023, released 2024 on the Swedish label AdOpen Records), is a quintet recording with tenor saxophonist Fabio Della Cuna, vibraphonist Jordan Corda, bassist Pietro Pancella and drummer Marcello Di Leonardo. The album is a tribute to what Pancella has called jazz's "unsung heroes," reworking compositions by pianists including Mary Lou Williams and Hank Jones. The Tony Pancella Quintet has toured the album in Italian clubs including Rome's Alexanderplatz Jazz Club, in 2024 appearing there and at Pescara's Jazz'n Fall festival alongside saxophonist Max Ionata.

Pancella currently teaches jazz piano and works as an artistic director for festivals and concerts in Italy; he served as a mentor in jazz piano at the 2004 Jazzinty Workshop in Slovenia. He has also coordinated the Vinosophia Sound Experience, a wine-and-jazz project pairing Abruzzo wines with original compositions by musicians under his direction.

Pancella's playing sits within the hard-driving, harmonically grounded post-bop and bebop mainstream, shaped directly by the two pianists he studied with in New York in 1991, Larry Willis and James Williams, and, by his own account, by an early workshop encounter with Max Roach. That lineage runs through his recorded work: the two-piano dialogue of Alter Ego with Willis, the swinging tribute repertoire of Duke.Monk & Viceversa and Monk'Us (Discogs tags the former "Bop"), and A Certain Attitude, tagged Post-Bop and Contemporary Jazz. His catalog also shows a recurring taste for close duo and small-group pairings built around a single partner, whether a fellow pianist (Willis), an accordionist (Moreno Bussoletti), a clarinetist (Bepi D'Amato) or a guitarist from outside the jazz mainstream (Uri Bracha's Brazilian- and Middle Eastern-inflected style on Different Like Two Drops of Water), alongside his longer-running quintet and quartet projects.