Miho Hazama (挾間 美帆) was born in Tokyo on November 13, 1986 and grew up moving between Hokkaido, Aomori and Tokyo as her father's job was transferred. She began on the electone, Yamaha's electronic organ, at the age of three in the company's own music school, and at ten reached the national final of the 1996 Junior Electone Concours. The schooling that followed was entirely classical: the Kunitachi College of Music's affiliated junior high school on the piano course in 1999, its high school on the composition course in 2002, and the college itself from 2005, where she took a degree in composition under Masakazu Natsuda and Kazunori Maruyama. Jazz arrived sideways, through the college's own New Tide Jazz Orchestra, and by her third year she was writing for professional ensembles outside the school: Yosuke Yamashita, the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, the Hyogo Performing Arts Center Orchestra, the Tokyo Kosei Wind Orchestra, the Siena Wind Orchestra and the Yamaha Symphonic Band.

She moved to New York in 2010 for the Manhattan School of Music's master's programme in jazz composition, on a school scholarship and a fellowship from the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs' overseas study programme, and studied there with Jim McNeely. An ASCAP Foundation Young Jazz Composer Award followed in 2011. She took the degree in May 2012 and recorded her first album two months later, on July 2 and 3 at Systems Two in Brooklyn, with the thirteen-piece band she had built to play her writing and named m_unit. Journey to Journey came out on Verve in Japan that November and on Sunnyside in the United States the following year, and took the Jazz Japan Award for album of the year in the rising-star category. Yosuke Yamashita produced her professional debut concert in January 2013 at Tokyo Opera City, billed as a jazz composer's declaration.

The next three m_unit records set the pattern. Time River (Verve, September 2015) was cut at Avatar Studios in two days that April, with Joshua Redman guesting on the ten-minute title track and Gil Goldstein on accordion. Dancer in Nowhere (Verve, November 2018) was made at Sound on Sound in New Jersey with Lionel Loueke on guitar and Kavita Shah singing on two pieces, and it carried "Somnambulant," the composition that had won her the BMI Foundation's sixteenth Charlie Parker Jazz Composition Prize in 2015. Beyond Orbits (Edition, September 2023) marked the band's tenth anniversary with the three-movement "Exoplanet Suite," Christian McBride taking the bass chair on its first movement and Immanuel Wilkins the alto solo on the closer. Between the second and third of those she made The Monk: Live at Bimhuis (Verve, 2018), seven Thelonious Monk pieces arranged for the Metropole Orkest Big Band and recorded at the Bimhuis in Amsterdam on October 13, 2017.

The institutional appointments arrived in a rush. She became composer in residence of the Siena Wind Orchestra in May 2017 and the Orchestra Ensemble Kanazawa's composer of the year for 2018 and 2019. On June 24, 2019 Danish Radio announced her as chief conductor of the Danish Radio Big Band, a post she took up at the band's October season opening; she was thirty-two, and the first woman to hold the job since the band was founded in 1964, in a line that runs through Thad Jones, Bob Brookmeyer and Jim McNeely. She became a permanent guest conductor of the Metropole Orkest in August 2020, and since 2025 a special conductor of the Norwegian Radio Orchestra. She is also associate artistic director of the New York Jazzharmonic, and has conducted the WDR Big Band, the hr-Bigband, the Norrbotten Big Band, the Clasijazz Orchestra and the Bohemian Caverns Jazz Orchestra.

Her work with the Copenhagen band has produced three albums. Imaginary Visions (Edition, 2021), seven of her own pieces, was recorded at the DR Koncerthuset over four days in March 2021 and mixed at Sear Sound in New York. Live Life This Day: Celebrating Thad Jones (Edition, March 2025) set her arrangements of Jones's music beside her own three-movement title suite and added the Danish National Symphony Orchestra; its first movement was nominated for Best Instrumental Composition at the 68th Grammy Awards. Frames (Edition, April 2026) writes her own six pieces through the successive musical directors who shaped the band, Ib Glindemann, Ray Pitts, Palle Mikkelborg, Thad Jones, Ole Kock Hansen, Bob Brookmeyer and Jim McNeely, who had passed away the previous September. She also conducted the Metropole Orkest's eightieth-anniversary record Arakatak (V2, March 2026), eight commissioned pieces premiered in the round at De Hallen in Amsterdam, with Vince Mendoza, Donny McCaslin, Mark Guiliana, Tineke Postma, Shai Maestro, Morris Kliphuis and Louis Cole among the featured names.

Alongside her own bands she has built a large second career writing and conducting for other people. She orchestrated Shirō Sagisu's score for Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo in 2012 and arranged three pieces for Ryuichi Sakamoto's Playing the Orchestra 2013; she composed "The Intersection" and arranged the horns on "GL/JM" for Junko Onishi's Tea Times (2016) and arranged the Willow Song from Otello for Onishi's Very Special (2017); she wrote "Wherever This Road Leads" and arranged Gillian Welch's "I'm Not Afraid to Die" for Owen Broder's Heritage: The American Roots Project (2018), arranged "Everyone Deserves a Second Chance" for Raul Midón, arranged "Be Water II" for Christian Sands (2020) and "Sound Evidence" for Jared Schonig (2021), wrote "Norhala" for Jennifer Wharton's Bonegasm (2023), "Suite Electus" for the Danish Radio Big Band's XL-LX anniversary box (2024) and "Chipmunk Timmy and Funny" for Ryan Truesdell's Synthesis (2024). She conducted Marius Neset's Tributes (ACT, 2020), the Terraza Big Band's One Day Wonder (2019) and the string ensemble on eight tracks of Hiromi Uehara's soundtrack to the animated film Blue Giant (2023). In August 2026 she arranged and conducted the BBC Concert Orchestra for the BBC Proms Miles Davis centenary concert at the Royal Albert Hall, with a quartet led by Ambrose Akinmusire; the programme was drawn largely from the Davis and Gil Evans collaborations, and her contributions included four numbers from Porgy and Bess, a medley folding "Will o' the Wisp" back into two other dances from Falla's El amor brujo, and the Rodrigo adagio from Sketches of Spain. She married the drummer and composer John Sturino in 2024, and presents her own programme, Miho Hazama's Jazz Voyage, on NHK-FM.

The thing that separates Hazama from the other writers of her generation is the instrument she built to play her music. m_unit is not a big band: it is thirteen pieces with only three reeds and a single trumpet, no trombone section at all, a French horn, a vibraphone and a full string quartet, which gives her an ensemble that can shade like a chamber group and still swing a section figure. The classical training shows in how she voices it, and she has never treated her repertoire choices as a genre question. Her first record closes an eight-piece programme of originals with an arrangement of Lady Gaga's "Paparazzi"; her second ends with A Perfect Circle's "Magdalena"; Dancer in Nowhere contains a reading of John Williams's "Olympic Fanfare and Theme," and Beyond Orbits an arrangement of Skip Scarborough's "Can't Hide Love." The lineage she works in is the orchestral-jazz one, and two threads in it are documented rather than inferred: the Danish Radio Big Band chief conductorship she inherited from Thad Jones, Bob Brookmeyer and Jim McNeely, whose influences she made the explicit subject of Frames, and the Gil Evans writing she was asked to orchestrate for a full symphony orchestra at the 2026 Proms. Reviewing that concert for UK Jazz News, Julian Maynard-Smith described her El amor brujo medley as a fiery sequence of trumpet stabs, galloping strings and orchestral woodblocks standing in for castanets. DownBeat named her one of its "25 for the Future" in 2016, and by then she had already been claimed by both sides of the divide she works across: a classical composition degree from Kunitachi, a jazz composition master's from the Manhattan School of Music, and a commission list that runs from the Tokyo Philharmonic to the Gothenburg Symphony to the Metropole Orkest.