Yvonnick Prene was born January 19, 1984, in Paris. He started on guitar, moved to diatonic harmonica, and eventually settled on the chromatic harmonica, the instrument Toots Thielemans had already established as jazz's rare go-to reed-free lead voice. He began playing in Parisian clubs at seventeen and went on to study at the Sorbonne, where he earned a master's degree in music in 2011.

While still enrolled at the Sorbonne, Prene relocated to New York and, between 2007 and 2009, was awarded a run of full-tuition scholarships: the MICEFA exchange program at the City College of New York, Columbia University's Alliance Program, and a merit scholarship at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, where he studied with Lee Konitz and bassist Reggie Workman. He completed a BA at the New School in 2011-2012 alongside his Sorbonne master's.

His first album as a leader, Introducing (2010), was a trio date with pianist Jeremy Siskind and bassist Noah Garabedian. His breakthrough followed in 2013 with Jour de Fête on SteepleChase's LookOut imprint, a quintet session recorded in New York that splits its rhythm section by track: Or Bareket plays bass on eight of the album's eleven tracks (1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11), with Phil Donkin covering the remaining three, and guitar likewise divided between Isaac Darche and Michael Valeanu. Prene followed it with Merci Toots (2015), a duo album with guitarist Pasquale Grasso built entirely from the Toots Thielemans songbook and self-released to mark the harmonica master's legacy, and Breathe (2016), a set of originals featuring Peter Bernstein on guitar, Jared Gold on Hammond organ, and Allan Mednard on drums, produced by bassist Lorin Cohen.

New York Moments (2019), his second SteepleChase release, is a working trio with Brian Charette on Hammond B3 organ and drummer Jordan Young. Listen! (2022, Sunnyside), produced by trumpeter Jeremy Pelt, paired Prene with pianist Kevin Hays, bassist Clovis Nicolas, drummer Bill Stewart, and tenor saxophonist Dayna Stephens, with Pelt himself sitting in on trumpet for one track. A Jobim tribute, Jobim's World (Sunnyside), followed in June 2024; it was not yet catalogued on Discogs at the time of writing, but its release is independently confirmed through Apple Music. Most recently, Un Harmonica Pour Django (2025, Minor Major Music), a vinyl-only tribute to Django Reinhardt produced by Daniel Yvinec, sets Prene's harmonica against a gypsy-jazz string section of guitarists Adrien Moignard and Mathieu Chatelain and bassist Diego Imbert, with guitarist Biréli Lagrène guesting on two tracks.

Alongside his own catalog, Prene is the founder of the New York Harmonica School and Harmonica Studio, has authored several instructional books for chromatic and diatonic harmonica, and performs as a Hohner ambassador. He has appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and played rooms including the Blue Note, Smalls, the Jazz Gallery, and Birdland in New York, as well as Jazz in Marciac and the Bern Jazz Festival in Europe.

The chromatic harmonica remains a rare lead instrument in jazz, and Prene works squarely in the lineage Toots Thielemans defined: a warm, vocal-like tone applied to bebop lines, standards, and ballads rather than to blues harmonica's more common jazz-adjacent role. Merci Toots, a full album drawn from Thielemans's own songbook, makes the influence explicit, while Un Harmonica Pour Django extends the same instrument into gypsy-jazz repertoire built around Django Reinhardt, a pairing rarely attempted on this horn. His working groups have consistently paired him with organ (Jared Gold, Brian Charette) as often as piano, a texture that leans on the harmonica's affinity with the Hammond's sustained tone.