Asaf Yuria was born in Tel Aviv in June 1985 and picked up the saxophone at nine. By his teens he was working the small rooms of the Tel Aviv jazz scene, and his own account of the period names the people who taught him on the bandstand: the American alto saxophonist Arnie Lawrence, who had founded the New School's jazz program in New York before relocating to Israel, along with Jess Koren, the pianist and educator Amit Golan, the clarinetist and painter Harold Rubin, guitarist Ofer Ganor and oud player Amos Hoffman. His first documented session came at eighteen, on guitarist Yotam Silberstein's The Arrival, cut in July 2003 with Gilad Abro on bass and Doron Tirosh on drums and released by Fresh Sound New Talent the following year. A second Israeli date followed in 2006, drummer Rea Bar-Ness's self-released Remember & Forget, taped at Hamon and Zara studios in Tel Aviv with Hoffman, pianist Omri Mor, trumpeter Avishai Cohen and, sharing the bass chair with Abro, Omer Avital.

He moved to New York in 2007 and enrolled at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, graduating in 2012. The teachers he names are Billy Harper, whom he describes as his closest mentor, along with George Cables, Reggie Workman, Billy Hart and Charles Tolliver. The same summer he arrived, in July 2007, he was back in Tel Aviv holding the tenor chair on Amit Golan's I Decided!, recorded over three days at the Lin and Ted Arison Israel Conservatory of Music with trumpeter Joe Magnarelli, Eden Bareket on baritone and Gilad Abro on bass. Golan died suddenly in December 2010, at forty-six, three weeks after scheduling the sessions for a new sextet album. His family, students and bandmates gathered in June 2011 and recorded it anyway, with Eddie Henderson taking the trumpet chair Golan had written for him; Yuria played tenor on the resulting Eddie Henderson & Friends Play the Music of Amit Golan, issued by Minton's Records in 2012.

New York work accumulated across the next decade in the Greenwich Village club circuit: Smalls, Mezzrow, Smoke, Iridium, Dizzy's and Birdland. He has cited stands with Jimmy Cobb, Kirk Lightsey, Freddie Redd, Billy Kaye, Magnarelli, Henderson and Jerry Gonzalez. In 2015 he arranged the horns and played tenor on Amos Hoffman's Back to the City, a New York session with Omer Avital on bass, Duane Eubanks on trumpet and Itai Kriss on flute.

The Avital association became the defining one. Yuria took a front-line chair in the bassist's two-tenor band alongside Alexander Levin and stayed for the whole of its recorded life, three albums over four years. Abutbul Music came first, released on Jazz Village in 2016 with Ofri Nehemya on drums and Yonathan Avishai at the piano; Yuria plays tenor and soprano on it. Eden Ladin replaced Avishai for Qantar, recorded at Brooklyn Recording on January 8 and 9, 2017, mixed in Paris and released by Jazz Family on September 7, 2018, the record that gave the band its name. On it Yuria plays tenor, saxello (the slightly curved soprano) and karkabas, the iron castanets of Moroccan gnawa music. The band's last album, New York Paradox, was cut at Wilson Live in Brooklyn on April 21 and 22, 2019, the five of them playing together in one room with no headphones, no separation and no edits, and released by Jazz&People and Zamzama on February 28, 2020. Yuria is on alto and tenor there.

His own leader career started in the middle of that run. PaPa WaWa, a quintet of all-original material with Josh Evans on trumpet, Eden Ladin on piano, Ben Meigners on bass and Jason Brown on drums, was released on October 22, 2018 by Zamzama Records, the label Avital had started the year before. The follow-up added Jonathan Voltzok's trombone to make a sextet and swapped Ladin for Jeremy Manasia: Exorcisms, seven Yuria originals recorded at Sear Sound in Manhattan by Chris Allen in the winter of 2019 and mixed by Pete Rende, came out on Jojo Records on November 5, 2021, with a sleeve that dedicates "Wise Eyes" to his mother Zehava. In 2022 and 2023 he taught music theory, private saxophone and ensembles in Tel Aviv, at the Israeli Conservatory and at the New School's program there, and in 2022 he played tenor and soprano on French drummer Simon Belelty's Pee Wee, recorded at the Studio de Meudon in Paris. He has also turned up well outside the jazz rooms: a guest saxophone spot on two tracks of the Israeli rock band Beit Habubot's Madafim in 2004, tenor across the satirical band Ha Biluim's Hora Haslama! in 2013, and horns on Maya Dunietz's Thank You Tree for Raw Tapes in 2023, alongside Rejoicer, who produced and mixed it.

In Light of a New Moon, out on Jojo Records on September 4, 2026, reverses the terms of everything before it: a quartet of veterans and a program of other people's tunes. It was recorded over two days at Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs by Maureen Sickler, with George Cables on piano, Billy Hart on drums and Omer Avital on bass, Joe Magnarelli guesting on two tracks, and liner notes by T.J. English. Cables and Hart were both his teachers at the New School, and two of the seven pieces are Cables compositions. The rest is repertoire he has played since his first gigs, including John Hicks's "After the Morning," Hank Mobley's "Hipsippy Blues" and Dizzy Gillespie's "Con Alma," plus one original, "Praise of Shadows." Of the project he has said, "I'd been dreaming about this record for more than a decade."

Yuria is a hard bop player who came up on records and never really left them. He has named John Coltrane and Charlie Parker as the sound he grew up inside, and Sonny Rollins, Coltrane, Benny Golson, Hank Mobley and Harold Land as the tenor lineage his own voice descends from. Reviewing Exorcisms for New York Music Daily in December 2021, delarue described a "slightly smoky tone" and "translucent, purist tunes" whose darkness stays understated, and credited the record with a welcome sense of humor; the writing on it leans on early-1960s Prestige textures, modal harmony, Latin rhythms and the blues. Yuria's own account of what he is after is less about vocabulary than about attention: he has said he is looking for "that mysterious condition in which the listeners and the musicians are immersed in the present moment." The three Avital albums pushed him somewhere else again, into Moroccan and Yemenite material where he doubled on saxello and karkabas and where a saxophone had to sit inside a groove rather than on top of it.