Mayuko Katakura (片倉真由子, Katakura Mayuko in Japanese order) was born on 9 July 1980 in Sendai, in a household where both parents were working jazz musicians: her father plays alto saxophone and her mother, Kazuko Katakura (片倉加寿子), is a jazz pianist. She began piano at five and spent her childhood on classical music. As she grew older, NPR's 2008 profile of her says, Thelonious Monk became the influence she leaned on most.

She entered Senzoku Gakuen Junior College (洗足学園短期大学) and switched her major to jazz piano, studying with Masaaki Imaizumi. In 2002 she won a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music in Boston, and she graduated in 2004; that year she played the Litchfield Jazz Festival in Connecticut with Dave Santoro's group. In 2005 she moved to New York for the Juilliard jazz programme, where, according to her Japanese Wikipedia biography, she studied piano with Kenny Barron and ensemble playing with the drummer Carl Allen and the bassist Ben Wolfe. A Juilliard Jazz Ensemble track credited to her, "Johnnie", appears on Jazziz On Disc (October 2007), a compilation of student recordings from fourteen music schools.

The year that put her on the map was 2006. She won the Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Piano Competition at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and the same year reached the semifinals of the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Piano Competition. Part of the Mary Lou Williams prize was a set at the Kennedy Center's Women in Jazz Festival, and on 11 May 2007 she played it with the bassist Yasushi Nakamura and the drummer Carmen Intorre Jr. NPR's JazzSet broadcast two numbers, Horace Silver's "Song for My Father" and her own "Blues for Tyner", on a program shared with the reed player Anat Cohen's group.

She came home in 2008. Her Japanese Wikipedia biography has her touring Japan and Korea that year with the Juilliard Jazz All-Stars (Carl Allen, Ron Blake and Nakamura) and sitting in for Joey Calderazzo in the Branford Marsalis Quartet's run at Blue Note Tokyo. Her first album as a leader, Inspiration (M&I, 16 September 2009), was a trio with Nakamura and Allen, and it won the New Star prize at the 43rd Swing Journal Jazz Disc Awards. Faith (29 September 2010) kept Allen and brought in the bassist Rodney Whitaker.

The records after that spread across several kinds of partnership. She recorded two albums with The Most, a quartet led by the alto saxophonist Seiji Tada (Luminescence, 2010, and True Courage, 2012), and played piano on tenor saxophonist Mabumi Yamaguchi's Evening (2011). With the tenor and soprano saxophonist Wataru Hamasaki she made an all-Ellington-and-Strayhorn duo, The Single Petal of a Rose (recorded 27 November 2011), and a second duo record, In a Sentimental Mood (2015). Echoes of Three (55 Records, 16 September 2015) put her back with Nakamura and Intorre, the rhythm section from her Kennedy Center set. For two albums she was the pianist in the Tokyo Cinema Jazz Trio of the drummer Masahiko Osaka, whose Jazz Cinema Paradise (2014) and Jazz Cinema Fantasy (2015) were recorded for Seven Seas in DSD. On 2 September 2016 she played the Tokyo Jazz Festival with her own trio (the bassist Yasuhiko Sato and the drummer Gene Jackson) and the Dutch alto saxophonist Benjamin Herman, and in February 2023 she toured the Netherlands with Herman, including a date at Amsterdam's BIMHUIS. His 2024 EP Café Largo carries her name as a featured artist.

The alto saxophonist Hidefumi Toki became her closest partner of the late 2010s. She played on his Missing What? (2016) and on Black Eyes (17 October 2018), the first release on the Days of Delight label. With Sato and the drummer Shingo Okudaira she recorded Plays Toki (2020) as the RST Trio, and she and Toki made the duo albums After Dark (6 November 2019) and Live at OurDelight (released January 2021). Toki passed away on 26 June 2021.

Days of Delight, founded and produced by Akiomi Hirano, has been her main label since. Plays Coltrane and Plays Standards came out together on 27 October 2020, both by a trio with the bassist Takumi Awaya and the drummer Noritaka Tanaka; the standards album was recorded on 12 to 14 February 2020 at Shirakabe Hall in Ukiha, Fukuoka, and its cover uses a work by the artist Taro Okamoto. Her duo records for the label are tied to him too. After Dark and Air, her 2021 duo with the trumpeter Miki Hirose, were recorded in Okamoto's former atelier in Minami-Aoyama, now preserved by the Taro Okamoto Memorial Museum, and Air was played on a hundred-year-old upright piano Okamoto had used. Next Standards (27 March 2025), a duo with Yamaguchi on 1960s repertoire by Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock and others, was recorded at the museum on 10 September and 10 December 2024.

Her own label, Mayuko Katakura Music, issued The Duality of My Soul in 2025, a trio record with Awaya and Tanaka recorded at Shirakabe Hall on 27 and 28 June 2024 and mastered by Scott Hull at Masterdisk in New York. She produced it herself; the cover carries printmaking credited to Kazuko Katakura, and the art direction and design are Awaya's. One of its titles, "A Dancer's Melancholy", is a tune she has put on four of her records: Faith (2010), Echoes of Three (2015), Ruby, My Dear (2019) and this one. In the same year she played piano on two albums by the bassist Kiyoshi Kitagawa, Turning Point and Spring Night, with Shun Ishiwaka on drums. Earlier credits include Kiyoto Fujiwara's Songbook55 (2023) and the Yoshihito Eto Trio's vinyl Everything I Love (2023). A 2026 compilation of live recordings from the Tokyo club Body & Soul includes a Mayuko Katakura Quintet performance of "The Circle of Color Emotions", a title that also appears on The Duality of My Soul and on the Eto trio's LP.

She teaches part-time in the jazz course at Senzoku Gakuen College of Music, and for the 2015 to 2016 edition of the Asian Youth Jazz Orchestra, a Japan Foundation project that brought together 28 young musicians from Japan and five Southeast Asian countries, she was listed as one of its music directors.

Katakura plays acoustic modern mainstream jazz of the post-bop kind, in a piano trio or in a duo with a horn, and the repertoire on her records shows where she stands. There are standards ("Autumn Leaves", "Body and Soul", "Over the Rainbow" on Plays Standards), a full set of Coltrane (Plays Coltrane, which opens with "Equinox" and includes "Naima" and "Wise One"), Ellington and Strayhorn (The Single Petal of a Rose), and the 1960s writing of Shorter and Hancock from Miles Davis's quintet that Next Standards is built on. Monk is the influence she names herself, and his "Pannonica" was in her trio's 2016 Tokyo Jazz Festival set; her debut opens with "Blues for Tyner", a title that points at McCoy Tyner.

Her education is the other half of the picture. Berklee and then Juilliard, under Kenny Barron and Carl Allen, put her in the New York mainstream tradition, and Allen played drums on both of her first two albums. Back in Tokyo she has worked mostly with the older generation of Japanese saxophonists, Toki (born 1950) and Yamaguchi (born 1946), as well as with her own peers.

She also writes. "Blues for Tyner" was her tune at the 2007 Kennedy Center set, and several originals reappear from record to record: "A Dancer's Melancholy" on four albums, "Pinocchio" on Echoes of Three and Ruby, My Dear, and "The Circle of Color Emotions" on her 2025 record and in the Body & Soul live set.