Joanne Brackeen was born Joanne Grogan on July 26, 1938, in Ventura, California, and was largely self-taught, though she studied briefly at the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music. A child prodigy, she taught herself piano at eleven by transcribing eight Frankie Carle solos in six months, and was performing professionally by twelve. Her earliest inspiration was Carle's pop-piano style, but hearing Charlie Parker permanently redirected her toward jazz. By the late 1950s she was gigging in Los Angeles with saxophonists Teddy Edwards, Dexter Gordon, Harold Land, Charles Lloyd, and Charles Brackeen, whom she married.

She relocated to New York City in 1965, and after her marriage ended, raised their four children while her own playing deepened under the influence of McCoy Tyner, Ornette Coleman, and Chick Corea. In 1969 she became the first woman ever to gig and record as a member of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile, remaining with the group until 1972 and appearing on Blakey's album Catalyst.

Brackeen began releasing albums under her own name in 1975, including Snooze (reissued as Six Ate), a trio recording with bassist Cecil McBee and drummer Billy Hart, and went on to collaborate with saxophonists Sonny Stitt and Stan Getz. She was named a 2018 NEA Jazz Master, the highest honor bestowed on jazz musicians in the United States, and continues to teach as a full-time professor at Berklee College of Music, also serving as a guest professor at the New School in New York.

Brackeen's harmonically advanced, rhythmically adventurous style, shaped by Tyner, Coleman, and Corea after an early grounding in bebop, made her one of the defining post-bop pianists to emerge from the 1970s, and her tenure as the first woman in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers marked a significant breakthrough within one of jazz's most storied institutions.