Renee Rosnes, born Irene Louise Rosnes on March 24, 1962, in Regina, Saskatchewan, is adopted and grows up in North Vancouver, British Columbia. She begins classical piano at age three and, at Handsworth Secondary School, is introduced to jazz by band director Bob Rebagliati. She goes on to study classical performance at the University of Toronto with pianist William Aide, an academic grounding that remains audible in the precision of her later playing.

In 1985 a Canada Council for the Arts grant brings Rosnes to New York City. She quickly becomes the pianist for Out of the Blue, a young Blue Note Records house band documented on 1989's Spiral Staircase, and in 1986 tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson hires her to play with his quartet at the Village Vanguard, the engagement that launches her international career. She tours with the Wayne Shorter Band in 1988, and in 1989 she joins trombonist J.J. Johnson's Quintet, remaining his pianist of choice until his retirement in 1997. Alongside that work she becomes the regular pianist in tenor saxophonist James Moody's quartet for roughly two decades.

Rosnes releases her self-titled debut as a leader on Blue Note in 1990, a session that draws Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Wayne Shorter, Branford Marsalis and Lewis Nash into the studio behind her, an unusually starry supporting cast for a first leader date. The same year she marries drummer Billy Drummond, and the two of them, together with bassist Ray Drummond, form the working trio The Drummonds, whose recordings (Native Colours, 1992; The Gift, 1994; When You Wish Upon a Star and Letter to Evans, both 2000; Pas de Trois and A Beautiful Friendship, both 2002; Once Upon a Time, 2003) run in parallel with her Blue Note leader catalog through the mid-1990s and into the 2000s. She and Billy Drummond have a son, Dylan, later a guitarist and singer-songwriter in his own right, and they divorce in 2006.

Rosnes's Blue Note run of the 1990s and 2000s becomes the backbone of her reputation as a leader. Ancestors (1996) pairs her with Chris Potter and Nicholas Payton; As We Are Now (1997) adds Christian McBride and Jack DeJohnette; Art & Soul (1999) features vocalist Dianne Reeves and percussionist Richard Bona; and Life on Earth (2001) assembles a large, genre-crossing ensemble that includes Duduka Da Fonseca, John Patitucci, Steve Turre and Steve Nelson. In 2003 she records Renee Rosnes and the Danish Radio Big Band, an album of her own big-band writing arranged and conducted by Jim McNeely.

From 2004 to 2009 Rosnes is a founding member of the SFJAZZ Collective, the San Francisco repertory octet built each season around new arrangements of a chosen composer's book alongside original writing by its members; her SFJAZZ colleagues across those years include Joshua Redman, Dave Douglas, Matt Penman, Eric Harland, Bobby Hutcherson and Nicholas Payton. In 2007 she marries pianist Bill Charlap, and in 2010 the two release the piano-duo album Double Portrait on Blue Note. Since 2011 she has also been a member of bassist Ron Carter's Foursight Band, touring frequently in Europe.

Rosnes founds and serves as pianist and musical director of Artemis, an all-star international band whose members have included vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant, clarinetist Anat Cohen, trumpeter Ingrid Jensen, saxophonists Melissa Aldana and Nicole Glover, bassist Noriko Ueda and drummer Allison Miller; DownBeat's readers' poll names Artemis Jazz Group of the Year three years running (2023-2025). Her own leader catalog continues on Smoke Sessions Records with Written in the Rocks (2016), Beloved of the Sky (2018, its title track inspired by a painting by Canadian artist Emily Carr), Kinds of Love (2021) and Crossing Paths (2024), her first album built entirely around Brazilian repertoire. She has won multiple Juno Awards across her career, including Best Jazz Album for For the Moment (1992) and Ancestors (1997), Jazz Album of the Year for Life on Earth (2003), and Solo Jazz Album of the Year for Written in the Rocks, Kinds of Love and Crossing Paths; she was also named SOCAN's Composer of the Year in 2003 and received the Oscar Peterson Award from the Festival International de Jazz de Montreal in 2018. From 2008 to 2010 she hosted a CBC Radio interview series profiling Canadian jazz musicians, and she has written cover-story interviews for JazzTimes, including a 2013 feature on Wayne Shorter's quartet. She remains an active performer, composer and bandleader.

Rosnes plays with a classically schooled touch and a harmonic sophistication that draws on both the hard-bop tradition she absorbed from her early employers and a broader, more contemporary compositional palette, evident in the way Life on Earth folds West African and Brazilian rhythm into a post-bop frame and Crossing Paths reworks the Brazilian songbook of Edu Lobo and Joyce Moreno. Critics single out her writing as much as her playing: DownBeat calls her "a virtuoso composer," and JazzTimes has praised her records for their "conceptual heft, suspenseful compositions and mesmerizing performances." Her long sideman apprenticeships with Joe Henderson, Wayne Shorter and J.J. Johnson shaped a rhythmic and harmonic vocabulary that she carried into her own bands, and as the pianist and musical director of both the SFJAZZ Collective and Artemis she has become one of the most consistently recorded and commissioned arrangers of her generation.