Terri Lyne Carrington was born August 4, 1965, in Medford, Massachusetts, into a musical family: her father was a saxophonist and president of the Boston Jazz Society, and her mother played piano. At seven she was given the drum kit that had belonged to her grandfather, Matt Carrington, who had played with Fats Waller and Chu Berry. After three years of private study she gave her first major performance at the Wichita Jazz Festival with Clark Terry at around age ten. At eleven, at a festival where Oscar Peterson was performing, Ella Fitzgerald introduced her to Peterson and the two began playing together; Berklee College of Music's president, Lawrence Berk, and his wife Alma heard her from the theater and offered her a full scholarship on the spot, making her the youngest person to that point to receive one. At Berklee she studied with drummer Alan Dawson from age fourteen and played alongside fellow students Kevin Eubanks, Donald Harrison and Greg Osby. In 1981 she made a private recording, TLC and Friends, with Kenny Barron, Buster Williams, George Coleman and her father.

In 1983, encouraged by her mentor Jack DeJohnette, Carrington moved to New York, where she worked with Lester Bowie, Stan Getz, James Moody, David Sanborn, Pharoah Sanders and Cassandra Wilson. In 1986 she won an audition for Wayne Shorter's band, the beginning of a recording relationship that would run for decades; Shorter himself later returned the favor as a guest on her own recording debut. In the late 1980s she moved to Los Angeles, where she was the house drummer for The Arsenio Hall Show and then for Quincy Jones's late-night program VIBE. Her Grammy-nominated debut as a leader, Real Life Story (Verve Forecast, 1989), drew on that same Los Angeles and New York network, with guest appearances from Wayne Shorter, Carlos Santana, John Scofield, Grover Washington Jr., Dianne Reeves and Patrice Rushen.

Carrington's session and touring career deepened through the 1990s and 2000s alongside a growing catalog of her own: Jazz Is a Spirit (ACT, 2002) and Structure (ACT, 2004), both recorded in Europe with saxophonist Greg Osby. She played drums on Herbie Hancock's Gershwin's World (Verve, 1998) and toured with each of Hancock's musical configurations, electric and acoustic alike, from 1997 to 2007. Her association with Wayne Shorter continued on his own albums High Life (Verve, 1995) and Alegría (Verve, 2003), and she recorded repeatedly across the same years with Dianne Reeves, going back to I Remember (Blue Note, 1991), as well as with Diana Krall, on The Girl in the Other Room (Verve, 2004), and a long list of others documented in her discography.

The Mosaic Project (Concord Jazz, 2011), Carrington's fifth album as a leader and her first for Concord, gathered an all-star roster of women instrumentalists and vocalists: pianists Geri Allen, Patrice Rushen and Helen Sung, bassist Esperanza Spalding, trumpeter Ingrid Jensen, reed players Anat Cohen, Tineke Postma and Hailey Niswanger, guitarist Linda Taylor, percussionist Sheila E., and vocalists Dianne Reeves, Cassandra Wilson, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Carmen Lundy, Nona Hendryx and Gretchen Parlato. It won the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Album at the 54th Annual Grammy Awards in February 2012, and Carrington revisited the concept with a 2015 sequel, The Mosaic Project: Love and Soul, featuring Chaka Khan among others. Two years after the original, Money Jungle: Provocative in Blue (GrooveJazz Media, 2013) reworked the 1962 Duke Ellington/Charles Mingus/Max Roach album of the same name with a core trio of Carrington, pianist Gerald Clayton and bassist Christian McBride, joined by guests including Antonio Hart, Tia Fuller, Clark Terry, Lizz Wright and Herbie Hancock, who contributes a spoken vocal cameo. It won the Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Album at the 56th Annual Grammy Awards in January 2014, making Carrington the first woman to win in that category.

In 2016 Carrington co-led the trio album Perfection (Motéma) with saxophonist David Murray and pianist Geri Allen, billed as the Murray, Allen & Carrington Power Trio. In 2018 she founded and became artistic director of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice, launched that fall to address the near-total absence of women from jazz education and performance opportunities; she also directs the Carr Center in Detroit and sits on the board of trustees of The Recording Academy. Around the same time she formed the electric, genre-blending band Social Science with bassist/saxophonist Morgan Guerin and guitarist Matthew Stevens among its rotating members, releasing the socially engaged double album Waiting Game (Motéma, 2019), which was Grammy-nominated for Best Jazz Instrumental Album. In October 2020 the National Endowment for the Arts named Carrington a 2021 NEA Jazz Master, an honor celebrated in an online concert on April 22, 2021 alongside fellow honorees Albert "Tootie" Heath, Phil Schaap and Henry Threadgill. In 2022 she published the songbook New Standards: 101 Lead Sheets by Women Composers and released a companion album, New Standards, Vol. 1 (Candid), with a core band of pianist Kris Davis, bassist Linda May Han Oh, trumpeter Nicholas Payton and guitarist Matthew Stevens plus guests including Ambrose Akinmusire, Ravi Coltrane, Samara Joy and Dianne Reeves; it won the Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Album at the 65th Annual Grammy Awards in February 2023. The same ceremony nominated her, in the same category, for Live at the Detroit Jazz Festival (Candid), a 2017 concert recording credited jointly to Wayne Shorter, Carrington, Leo Genovese and Esperanza Spalding that turned out to document Shorter's final recorded performance before his 2023 death. In 2025 Carrington released We Insist 2025! (Candid) with vocalist Christie Dashiell, a reworking of Max Roach and Oscar Brown Jr.'s 1960 civil-rights-era album We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite for the present day; it was nominated for the Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Album at the 68th Annual Grammy Awards in 2026.

Carrington plays with a technical range built on hard-bop fundamentals but a touch shaped as much by funk and R&B as by jazz, and colleagues consistently single out her time feel: a way of playing time, using the drums rather than only the cymbals to state the pulse, that traces to her mentors Jack DeJohnette, Roy Haynes, Tony Williams and Elvin Jones. That versatility let her build two careers side by side without either one crowding out the other: three decades of high-profile session and touring work behind singers, big bands and fusion groups, and an increasingly personal body of work as a leader, composer and producer that runs from the acoustic hard bop of her earliest records through the star-studded, women-centered Mosaic Project albums to Social Science's electric, hip-hop- and indie-rock-inflected social commentary. Since founding the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice in 2018, she has become as well known for that advocacy, and for curating and teaching a jazz repertoire that includes women composers alongside the standard canon, as for her playing.