Steven Lugerner was born on May 20, 1988 and grew up in the suburbs south of San Francisco. His first instrument was the trumpet, which lasted about as long as his family could stand it; on his music teacher's advice he switched to clarinet, then added oboe in fifth grade, an instrument almost nobody that age takes up. Through middle school and high school he played clarinet and oboe in school ensembles, college-level bands and professional pit orchestras, and in the middle of high school he began serious study of the saxophone and of jazz. The records in the house had already done part of the work: Milt Jackson, Paul Desmond, Stan Getz and Steely Dan. He first attended the Stanford Jazz Workshop as a student in 2002, and graduated from Burlingame High School in 2006.

That autumn he moved to New York on scholarship to The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, graduating with honors in 2010. His teachers and mentors there included Jane Ira Bloom, Miguel Zenón, Mike DiRubbo, Chris Cheek, Ralph Alessi and Jamie Baum. He also kept working with two friends he had played with since middle school in California, bassist Matthew Wohl and drummer Max Jaffe; the three of them formed the collective trio Chives, which issued For Brian Wilson in December 2010 and Dads in August 2012 while all three were living together in Brooklyn. Alongside that he played reeds in two Brooklyn art-rock bands built around songwriters, In One Wind and killerBOB, both of which recorded for the Primary Records collective.

His arrival as a leader came as a double album released on March 1, 2011, two records issued together in a two-disc digipak. These Are The Words is a suite of seven pieces drawn from the opening verses of the books of the Torah, played by a quartet of Lugerner on saxophones, clarinets, oboe, English horn and flute with trumpeter Darren Johnston, pianist Myra Melford and drummer Matt Wilson, recorded at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley. Narratives is the Steven Lugerner Septet: Lucas Pino on tenor saxophone and flute, Itamar Borochov on trumpet and flugelhorn, Angelo Spagnolo on guitar, Glenn Zaleski on piano, Ross Gallagher on bass and Michael W. Davis on drums, cut at Systems Two in Brooklyn and produced by Jamie Baum. Nate Chinen in The New York Times called him "an impeccably trained multi-reedist," and Francis Davis in The Village Voice described the writing as a textured, nearly seamless blend of composition and improvisation.

Two more New York projects followed quickly. On April 1, 2012 he brought a ten-piece band into The Bunker Studio in Brooklyn for Live at The Bunker, with Matt Marantz, Jonah Parzen-Johnson, Stephanie Richards, Natalie Cressman, Angelo Spagnolo, Dave Scanlon, Glenn Zaleski, Matthew Wohl and Max Jaffe; that August he recorded a set of free improvisations for clarinet and viola with José Valente at COMA in the ABC No Rio basement. In May 2013 the These Are The Words quartet reconvened for For We Have Heard, ten compact pieces after the Book of Joshua, released by the Lithuanian label NoBusiness Records and given three stars in DownBeat. The same year he began the Gravitations series, a set of duo records built by an unusual method: a partner records solo improvisations alone, and Lugerner then composes and arranges woodwind orchestrations around them and overdubs his own parts months or years later. Volume 1 (2013) works from nylon-string guitar and banjo improvisations by Angelo Spagnolo, Volume II (2015) from solo piano Fred Hersch recorded in June 2013, and Volume III (2016) from solo vibraphone Patricia Brennan recorded in May 2013.

In 2013 Lugerner moved back to the Bay Area and joined the Stanford Jazz Workshop as its education program coordinator, becoming director of educational and festival programming in 2023. His West Coast bands date from that move. JACKNIFE, a quintet devoted to the music of Jackie McLean, drew its book from McLean's Blue Note albums Jacknife, It's Time, Let Freedom Ring and New Soil, and released The Music of Jackie McLean in April 2016 with JJ Kirkpatrick on trumpet, Richard Sears on piano, Garret Lang on bass and Michael Mitchell on drums; DownBeat gave it three and a half stars. That September he also appeared on Sears's Altadena (Ropeadope), a five-part suite the pianist wrote on an LA Jazz Society commission for the drummer Albert "Tootie" Heath, who had taught Sears at the Stanford Jazz Workshop and who plays on the record. Lugerner has also been named a Rising Star on soprano saxophone in the DownBeat Critics Poll, including in the 2019 edition.

In 2018 he founded Slow & Steady Records with trumpeter Ross Eustis, a nonprofit label for West Coast creative musicians, and released his largest project on it. An Eight Out of Nine, recorded at Fantasy Studios on May 8, 2017 and produced with bassist Todd Sickafoose, introduced the SLUGish Ensemble with Carmen Staaf on keyboards, Allison Miller on drums, Justin Rock on guitar and a front line including trombone, trumpet, vibraphone and cello; Bandcamp Daily and the Mercury News both named it among the best jazz albums of 2018. The Altadena band's 2017 trip to Los Angeles produced a second record of a very different kind: on August 28 that year Lugerner, Garret Lang and Tootie Heath cut It Takes One to Know One, a chordless trio session of standards and blues on which he plays nothing but bass clarinet, including two Jimmy Heath tunes, Joe Henderson's "Jinrikisha" and Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn's "Isfahan." It was held back until April 2022.

The SLUGish Ensemble has continued as his main vehicle, reconstituted around a younger Bay Area rhythm section of Justin Rock, Giulio Xavier Cetto and Michael Mitchell. Live at Sam First, taped over two nights at the Los Angeles club in September 2019 and issued in November 2022, sets his own tunes beside songs by Wye Oak, Iron & Wine and The Velvet Teen. In Solitude (September 2023) collects seven pieces written during the first year of the pandemic and titled after streets in the Miraloma neighborhood of San Francisco where he was then living, and Urban Crawl (June 2025) does the same for the Nob Hill intersections he walked after moving downtown. He continues to live in San Francisco, to run the label, and to lead a monthly trio residency in the city.

Lugerner's identity rests on two things that rarely sit together: a woodwind doubler's range, covering saxophones from soprano to baritone plus clarinet, bass clarinet, flute, alto flute, oboe and English horn, and a composer's habit of building whole records around a single structural idea. The Torah suite of These Are The Words, the Book of Joshua miniatures of For We Have Heard, the street names of In Solitude and Urban Crawl, and the Gravitations method of orchestrating another musician's finished improvisation are all versions of the same instinct, and the writing draws as much on his orchestral training on the double reeds as on the saxophone tradition. Peter Margasak in the Chicago Tribune called him an ambitious composer, arranger and conceptualist overflowing with ideas, and in the Chicago Reader singled out his soprano playing for a dry sound that avoids sweetness and recalls Steve Lacy; Chives has been bracketed critically with Dave Douglas and The Bad Plus. The SLUGish records pull in a different direction, toward long cyclical structures and rock and minimalist textures that reviewers have compared to Steve Reich, and Jazziz heard in An Eight Out of Nine a Northern Californian answer to the Los Angeles crossover scene. JACKNIFE is the plainest statement of where he comes from: reviewers heard the aggressiveness and rough edges of the young Jackie McLean in his alto playing. His own account of how he writes credits a class with Jane Ira Bloom at The New School, who had students improvise into a recorder on waking, transcribe the result and mine it for a melody or a bass line, a method he revived during lockdown to produce the In Solitude material.