Her father was the Algerian-born film director and writer Marcel Aboulker and her maternal grandfather was the composer Henry Février.
While following a course in composition and keyboard studies at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in Paris, she started composing for the theatre, the cinema and television.
Among her work for adults are two operas based on plays by Eugène Ionesco and settings of poems by Guillevic and Charles Cros.
In 1998, she was commissioned by the Orchestre de Picardie to write the oratorio L'Homme qui titubait dans la guerre to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the ending of World War I and this was subsequently chosen to represent France when Weimar became European city of culture in 1999.
The 2011 contemporary classical album Troika includes Isabelle Aboulker's song cycle Caprice étrange, set to poems written in French by 19th-century Russian poets Mikhail Lermontov, Aleksandr Pushkin and Fyodor Tyutchev.