Jason Moran was born on January 21, 1975, in Houston, Texas, and grew up in the city's Pleasantville neighborhood. His father, Andy, was an investment banker and his mother, Mary, a teacher; both took him to the Houston Symphony and to museums and galleries, and the household held a record collection of roughly 10,000 discs running from Motown to classical music to avant-garde jazz. He began classical piano at six in a Suzuki-method school run by Yelena Kurinets, leaned toward hip hop as a boy, and at 13 heard Thelonious Monk's "'Round Midnight" at home, which turned him toward jazz. He graduated in 1993 from Houston's High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, where the jazz program was headed by Robert Morgan, and then studied at the Manhattan School of Music, taking a bachelor of music in 1997 with the pianist Jaki Byard as his teacher. In 1998 he took part in Betty Carter's Jazz Ahead workshop, writing the piece "Make a Decision" for its closing concert.

While still a senior at Manhattan, Moran was invited to join the band of the saxophonist Greg Osby for a European tour, with no audition, and he made his first recorded appearance on Osby's Blue Note album Further Ado (1997). Osby introduced him to the pianists Muhal Richard Abrams and Andrew Hill, and the association led to Moran's own Blue Note contract. His debut as a leader, Soundtrack to Human Motion (recorded August 29 and 30, 1998, released 1999), used Osby, the vibraphonist Stefon Harris, the bassist Lonnie Plaxico and the drummer Eric Harland, a Manhattan School classmate who had recommended him to Osby. For Facing Left (recorded January 15 and 16, 2000), he used a trio drawn from Osby's group, with the bassist Tarus Mateen and the drummer Nasheet Waits. That trio became The Bandwagon, and it added the elder multi-instrumentalist Sam Rivers for Black Stars (2001), a record NPR later placed on a list of the decade's 50 most important recordings. He followed with the solo album Modernistic (2002) and the live trio set The Bandwagon, recorded at the Village Vanguard on November 29 and 30, 2002, and released in 2003.

The trio widened its range over the next years. In 2004 Moran played on the saxophonist Don Byron's Ivey-Divey, and the Ivey-Divey Trio toured through 2009. Same Mother (recorded May 15 and 16, 2004, released in 2005) explored the blues with the guitarist Marvin Sewell added, and Artist in Residence (2006) gathered pieces commissioned by museums, including works tied to Adrian Piper at the Walker Art Center and to Joan Jonas. In My Mind, first performed in 2007, built a multimedia concert on the 1959 Town Hall big-band concert of Thelonious Monk, using filmed rehearsal material from the photographer W. Eugene Smith's archive and a horn section added to the trio as The Big Bandwagon. In April 2007 Moran replaced Geri Allen in the Charles Lloyd New Quartet, which toured and recorded for ECM, and from September 2009 until about 2012 he also toured in the Dave Holland Overtone Quartet. His trio album Ten (released June 22, 2010), marking ten years since Facing Left, won the Down Beat critics' poll for jazz album of the year, and in September 2010 he was named a MacArthur Fellow.

Moran also became an institution builder. He joined the New England Conservatory faculty in 2010 and, according to the conservatory's jazz faculty listing, still teaches there in 2026. At the Kennedy Center in Washington he was musical adviser for jazz from 2011 and artistic director for jazz from 2014, the post that Billy Taylor had held. On July 8, 2025, he announced on social media that he had left the position after 14 years, saying he had stepped away on Juneteenth and thanking the staff and artists who had worked with him there. In 2015 he was appointed an honorary professor at the Rhythmic Music Conservatory in Copenhagen, and in 2026 Manhattan School of Music awarded him an honorary doctorate.

His own programs often cross into theater, film and visual art. Since 2011 he has led the Fats Waller Dance Party, first commissioned by Harlem Stage, which became the album All Rise: A Joyful Elegy for Fats Waller (released September 16, 2014). He scored the films Selma (2014) and 13th (2016), made Looks of a Lot with the artist Theaster Gates for Chicago's Symphony Center (2014), and in 2017 performed MASS (HOWL, eon) with the painter Julie Mehretu at the Performa biennial. The Walker Art Center gave him a museum survey in 2018. From 2016 most of his own releases have appeared on the Yes label, among them the solo The Armory Concert, Bangs with the cornetist Ron Miles and the guitarist Mary Halvorson, a live Bandwagon album recorded at the Vanguard, and From the Dancehall to the Battlefield (2023), a tribute to the bandleader James Reese Europe. He has also recorded with the electronic musician BlankFor.ms and the drummer Marcus Gilmore (Refract, 2023; Shards, 2026), with Norway's Trondheim Jazz Orchestra (Go to Your North, 2025), and again with Lloyd (The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow, 2024, and Figure in Blue, 2025). His solo album Jason Moran Plays Duke Ellington, issued in 2026 on Bandcamp, was reviewed on NPR's Fresh Air that August. In 2003 he married the mezzo-soprano Alicia Hall Moran, who has been his collaborator on projects such as the 2012 Whitney Biennial event BLEED.

Moran plays post-bop and avant-garde jazz with strong roots in the older piano tradition, and he treats stride, blues, hip hop rhythm, classical repertoire and the spaced-out melodies of Thelonious Monk as one vocabulary. His sources include Monk, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller and his teacher Jaki Byard, and he has named Henry Threadgill as his favorite composer, organizing a two-day Threadgill festival in 2014. His records often take a historical figure or an artwork as a subject, from the Monk Town Hall concert to Waller's Harlem entertainment, so that a program can be as much an essay as a set of tunes. Critics honored the approach early: Down Beat named him its rising-star pianist, composer and jazz artist for three straight years (2003 to 2005), Ten topped the 2010 Village Voice jazz critics' poll, and the MacArthur Foundation recognized him in 2010. He in turn has helped younger players, producing Immanuel Wilkins's Omega (2020) and the Blue Note debut of Ambrose Akinmusire.