Akiko Grace (アキコ・グレース) was born on 13 August 1974 in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. Her mother taught piano, and she began playing at three. She came to jazz through a radio broadcast of Oscar Peterson, according to her official biography, and in her late teens she started playing live in Boston and New York. She graduated from the Tokyo University of the Arts, where she studied musicology, and from the Berklee College of Music, where she studied piano performance. Japanese Wikipedia dates a 1998 quartet engagement to a stretch of playing with the saxophonist George Garzone, and says she moved to New York in 2000 after obtaining a United States artist visa.

In 2001 she signed with Nippon Columbia and became the first Japanese artist on the Savoy label. Her debut, From New York, came out on 11 January 2002 (Savoy, COCB-53003) with Ron Carter on bass and Bill Stewart on drums, and was produced by Ken Komoguchi with Grace herself. It earned a Swing Journal Gold Disc. Manhattan Story followed on 28 September 2002 with Larry Grenadier on bass and Stewart on drums, and earned a second Gold Disc in the same year, which her official biography describes as a first in Japanese jazz. That year she was also named a New Star in the Swing Journal Jazz Disk Grand Prix, a selection her biography says was unanimous. In November 2002 the ensemble album Jazz Street: The Duo + paired her with the bassist Kiyoto Fujiwara, the flutist Rie Akagi, the guitarist and singer Yoshiro Nakamura, the saxophonist Tetsuro Kawashima and the violinist Toshihiro Nakanishi.

The Grenadier and Stewart trio recorded New York Style at Avatar Studio C in New York on 20 and 21 April 2003, released on 23 July 2003. It is the third album of what her biography calls her New York trilogy, and it won the Agency for Cultural Affairs Arts Festival Excellence Award in the record division and the Swing Journal Japan Jazz Award. Her 2002 trio concert with Gary Peacock and Jorge Rossy at Dai-ichi Seimei Hall won the Music Pen Club Best Performance Award in the domestic category, according to the same biography.

Tokyo (3 March 2004), which her biography calls her first album recorded in Tokyo, was made at Columbia Akasaka Studios from 22 November to 10 December 2003. It turns toward Japanese material, with "Kagome Kagome," "Oborozukiyo" and "Shimauta," plus "Donna Lee" and "Giant Steps," and features the shakuhachi player Dozan Fujiwara, the violinist Toshihiro Nakanishi and a string group alongside Kiyoto Fujiwara and the drummer Tappi Iwase. In September 2004 she recorded From Oslo at Rainbow Studio in Oslo with Grenadier and the drummer Jon Christensen, engineered by Jan Erik Kongshaug, released on 1 December 2004; her biography counts it as her third Gold Disc. Another Story in New York (22 December 2004) brought the Grenadier and Stewart trio back, with Ron Carter and George Garzone added on two tracks, "I Want to Talk About You" and "Tribute to Trane."

In June 2006 she released two albums on the same day. Illume is an album of her own pieces produced by Bill Laswell, who also plays bass and electronics on it, and Momentum is a live trio recording with the bassist Daiki Yasukagawa and the drummer Taro Koyama. In July 2007 she began "Piano Mode," a project to compose, record and release one piano piece a month for a year. Graceful Vision (23 July 2008), her tenth album according to her biography, introduced a new New York trio of Larry Grenadier and Ari Hoenig, and Pianorium (21 January 2009) was her first album made entirely of her own solo piano compositions.

From 2010 she led the piano trio AGTC (Akiko Grace Trio Collective) for original material, and between 2011 and 2015 she worked with taiko drummers, dancers and orchestras and gave the improvised solo concert "Five Senses Journey." After March 2011 she took part in benefit projects, among them the "Sunflower Waltz Project," which recorded her song with the Tokyo FM Chorus and a choir of students in Koriyama, Fukushima. From 2015 to 2017 she composed the theme and music for what her biography calls Japan's first 4K documentary film, on the forest and coast of the Ise Shrine. In 2018 she recorded the improvised solo album Various Colors Piano Works at a Jean Cocteau event in Tokyo, part of a Japan-France exchange programme. Since 2020 she has led a seminar called "Creation Site" that connects music with other fields. She remains active, and her official site carries concert news from 2026.

Grace works mainly in the piano-trio tradition, recording with American rhythm sections and playing standards ("Body and Soul," "Caravan," "Waltz for Debby," "You Must Believe in Spring," "Norwegian Wood") beside her own compositions, among them "Pulse Fiction," "Delancey Street Blues" and "Transition." Her official biography points to Oscar Peterson as the player who first drew her to jazz; the Savoy-era trio sessions with Larry Grenadier and Bill Stewart are the core of the catalogue. Jazz-critical recognition came early and from Japan's main jazz outlets, through Swing Journal's Gold Discs and Jazz Disk awards.

She has also worked outside the trio format. Illume adds electronics and Laswell's bass, Pianorium and Various Colors Piano Works are solo piano works, and Tokyo sets Japanese folk songs and themes for piano with shakuhachi and strings. According to her Japanese biography she has also done film scoring, radio hosting and a newspaper column. Her catalogue is overwhelmingly jazz, released on the Savoy and JRoom jazz imprints.