Zoe Pia was born in 1986 in Mogoro, in Sardinia's Alta Marmilla subregion, where she received her first clarinet as a Christmas present at age eight. She earned her clarinet diploma from the Conservatory of Cagliari as a teenager, then specialized at the Conservatory of Rovigo, graduating with full marks and cum laude in chamber music and as a soloist, and later completing a degree there in musical composition. After playing Franco Donatoni's Hot alongside trumpeter Marco Tamburini, she pursued jazz studies specifically, attending the Accademia Internazionale Siena Jazz, Nuoro Jazz, the Accademia Chigiana's international seminars and the Accademia del Teatro alla Scala in Milan, and spending six months at the Conservatorio Superior de Musica de Murcia in Spain. Sardinian traditional music, and in particular the launeddas, a triple-piped single-reed instrument unique to the island, became a central part of her musical identity alongside the clarinet.

Her debut album, Shardana (2016, Caligola Records), set the pattern for her work since: a fusion of Sardinian folk material, contemporary jazz and world music, built around her clarinet and launeddas playing, with Roberto De Nittis on piano and keyboards, Sebastian Mannutza on drums and violin, and tuba from Glauco Benedetti. Trumpeter Paolo Fresu contributed the album's liner notes. Shardana took her to major Italian and international jazz festivals, and an aleatoric score she wrote won a distinction at the 2016 International Prize for Non-Conventional Score Music Writing. She has since performed at venues including Teatro alla Scala in Milan and the Venice Biennale, and at festivals such as the Sudtirol Jazz Festival and the Torino Jazz Festival, and was named artist in residence by the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Toronto in 2024.

Pia has built a parallel career as a session and guest player, Discogs-credited on bass clarinet and piccolo clarinet on trombonist Mauro Ottolini's Fabrizio De André tribute Tenco - Come Ti Vedono Gli Altri (2017), and on piccolo clarinet, steel flute and other reed and flute doubles on pianist Roberto De Nittis's albums Dada (2019) and Mae (2023), both on Caligola. In 2023 she co-led MITO (AlfaMusic) with Sicilian pianist Cettina Donato, a twelve-track concept album setting Greek and Sardinian mythological figures to music, reviewed favorably by All About Jazz. In 2024 she recorded Improvisations and Textures (Modica Music), a fully improvised duo project with Canadian bassist Roberto Occhipinti. In 2025 she released two further duo and collaborative projects: Rite (Parco Della Musica Records), a free-improvisation duo with Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson that the two developed after meeting through Fire! Orchestra connections and touring Italy together in 2023; and Indindara (Losen Records), pairing her clarinet, launeddas and electronics with the traditional Sardinian male vocal quartet Tenores di Orosei Antoni Milia. Most recently she has led EIC (Eden Inverted Collective), a quintet pairing her with four classical percussionists under 35; the group's debut album Atlantidei (2026, Caligola Records) premiered at the 2025 Torino Jazz Festival and won a SIAE "Per Chi Crea 2024" grant in the New Works category.

Pia's core project is the fusion of Sardinian folk material, in particular launeddas playing, with contemporary and free jazz vocabulary, a direction she has pursued since her 2016 debut Shardana and continued on Indindara and the EIC project Atlantidei. Her duo work points toward the freer end of that spectrum: Rite, with free-jazz saxophonist Mats Gustafsson, was praised by The Free Jazz Collective for "beautifully worked phrasing" and described as combining Sardinian folk elements, Sami joik and electronic music into a new improvised vocabulary. Not every critic reads her ethnic-fusion work as jazz outright; Jazz Journal's review of Indindara placed that specific album "more readily in the area of World Music" than jazz proper, a fair distinction given how far forward the Tenores di Orosei vocal group sits in the mix on that record. Her other work runs closer to conventional jazz instrumentation and setting, including her mythological concept album MITO with pianist Cettina Donato, which All About Jazz situated within twentieth-century classical and French Impressionist harmony as much as jazz, and her session work for Mauro Ottolini and Roberto De Nittis, both squarely within Italy's contemporary jazz scene.