Antonio Sanchez was born November 1, 1971, in Mexico City, the grandson of the celebrated Mexican stage and film actor Ignacio Lopez Tarso. He started on drums at five, and by his teens was already working professionally in Mexico City. He earned a degree in classical piano from Mexico's National Conservatory in 1993 before relocating to Boston, where he graduated magna cum laude in jazz studies from Berklee College of Music and then completed a master's degree on scholarship in jazz improvisation at the New England Conservatory.

While still a student, in 1997 his NEC teacher Danilo Perez recommended him to alto saxophonist Paquito D'Rivera and brought him into his own acoustic trio; Sanchez went on to record Perez's Grammy-nominated Motherland (2002, Verve), a session that also included Chris Potter and John Patitucci. Sanchez moved to New York in 1999 and quickly built a reputation as an in-demand sideman. Pat Metheny heard him on tour and invited him to join the Pat Metheny Group, a partnership that would run 18 years across nine albums and define the second half of Sanchez's career alongside his own.

Sanchez's tenure with Metheny opened with Speaking of Now (2002, Warner Bros.), which won the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Jazz Album, and continued through The Way Up (2005, Nonesuch), a second Grammy in the same category. He appeared on the stripped-down trio recordings Day Trip (2008) and the Tokyo Day Trip live EP (2008), both with Christian McBride on bass, then on Unity Band (2012, Nonesuch), with Chris Potter and Ben Williams, which brought a third Grammy, for Best Jazz Instrumental Album. The association continued through Tap: Book of Angels Volume 20 (2013), Kin (<-->) (2014, credited to the Pat Metheny Unity Group), the live double album The Unity Sessions (2016), and From This Place (2020).

Alongside the Metheny chair, Sanchez built a substantial career as a bandleader, beginning with Migration (2007, CAM Jazz), a debut that featured both Metheny and Chick Corea as guests alongside Scott Colley, David Sanchez, and Chris Potter. He followed it with the double live album Live in New York at Jazz Standard (2010); New Life (2013), with David Binney, Donny McCaslin, and a young rhythm section of John Escreet and Matt Brewer; and Three Times Three (2014), an unusual format pairing Sanchez's drums with three separate trios (John Patitucci and Brad Mehldau; Christian McBride and Joe Lovano; Matt Brewer and John Scofield). His working band Migration, with Seamus Blake, John Escreet, and Matt Brewer, produced the ambitious four-part The Meridian Suite (2015), and later Lines in the Sand (2018), a concept record addressing the U.S.-Mexico border that folded in poetry recitation alongside the music. In between, Sanchez made Bad Hombre (2017, Grammy-nominated for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album), a one-man electronic record on which he played every instrument and sampled his own grandfather's voice, and Channels of Energy (2018), a large-ensemble recording with the WDR Big Band Koln arranged and conducted by Vince Mendoza. More recently he co-led Trio Grande (2020, Whirlwind Recordings) with saxophonist Will Vinson and Gilad Hekselman, released Shift (Bad Hombre Vol. II) (2022), and in 2025 recorded BEATrio with Bela Fleck and Edmar Castaneda, which earned a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album.

Sanchez's profile broadened dramatically in 2014 when director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu commissioned him to score Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), his first film. The result was almost entirely solo, largely improvised drums, threaded through the film's real-time long-take structure and interspersed with brief excerpts of pre-existing orchestral music by Mahler and Tchaikovsky. That mix of original percussion and pre-existing classical cues, roughly 17 minutes of the latter, led the Academy's music branch to rule the score ineligible for the Academy Award for Best Original Score, citing its standing rule against scores "diluted by the use of tracked themes or other pre-existing music... or assembled from the music of more than one composer." An appeal, backed by a detailed cue sheet and letters from the studio and the director, was rejected. The disqualification became one of the more debated Oscar-season stories of the year, but the score went on to win the Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media at the 58th Grammy Awards in February 2016, along with the Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Score and a Satellite Award, and nominations for a Golden Globe and a BAFTA. Sanchez returned to scoring a decade later for Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg's Apple TV+ series The Studio (2025), building on the temp-tracked Birdman material the show's creators had used while cutting early episodes into a fuller, more orchestrated score that earned Sanchez his first Emmy nomination, for Outstanding Music Composition for a Series, in 2025.

Across his own catalog and the Metheny discography, Sanchez has won four Grammy Awards, joins a New York University jazz faculty he has taught on since 2006, and has been named Jazz Drummer of the Year three times in Modern Drummer magazine's readers' poll.

Sanchez plays with a technical command and metric sophistication that made him a natural fit for Pat Metheny's harmonically dense, constantly modulating compositions, but his own bandleading work reveals a broader vocabulary: Mexican folkloric rhythm, contemporary classical structure, and an electronic-music sensibility that surfaced fully on the self-performed, self-programmed Bad Hombre. The Birdman score reframed what a drum kit could do as a film-scoring instrument, an entirely improvised, largely unaccompanied performance carrying real-time dramatic tension across ninety minutes, an approach with almost no precedent in mainstream cinema and one that directly shaped the sound of The Studio a decade later. Critics and peers alike single out his combination of raw power and compositional control: he is as comfortable driving a hard-swinging quartet as he is scoring an art-house film or building a genre-blurring solo record from loops and voice memos of his own family.