Ben Tiberio was born into a musical household in Rochester, New York, and earned a bachelor's degree in jazz performance from the University of Miami's Frost School of Music on a full scholarship, coming up through Miami's notoriously competitive collegiate jazz scene. His earliest confirmed recording credit predates even that: a 2011 appearance on trumpeter Dave Chisholm's self-released album Calligraphy, recorded while Tiberio was still establishing himself, alongside a second bassist, Dom Drwal, in Chisholm's circle out of the Rochester/Eastman orbit.

He relocated to New York City in 2015 and quickly built a reputation as a versatile, forward-thinking sideman in the upper tier of the city's improvised-music scene. Tiberio's bass has anchored bands led by vibraphonist Joel Ross, saxophonist Chad Lefkowitz-Brown, drummer Ari Hoenig, guitarist Bob Sneider, vocalist Veronica Swift, saxophonist María Grand, pianist Shai Maestro, saxophonist Ben Wendel, and pianist Aaron Goldberg, and he has shared stages and recordings with Kenny Barron, Herlin Riley, Gretchen Parlato, Jazzmeia Horn, Jonathan Blake, and Danilo Pérez. His most visible credit remains bassist Joel Ross's 2019 Blue Note debut KingMaker, where he plays throughout the record's Immanuel Wilkins/Jeremy Corren/Jeremy Dutton front line and is given a solo feature, "Interlude (bass solo)," that he alone is credited as writing. He has also been a fixture of drummer Ari Hoenig's trio on record, appearing on both Golden Treasures (2022) and Tea For Three (2024) for Fresh Sound New Talent, and has performed across five continents at rooms including Dizzy's Club, Minton's Playhouse, and Smoke Jazz Club in New York.

Tiberio is also a working composer, and his writing was recognized years before he ever released an album under his own name: in 2014, ASCAP's Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composer Awards gave him an honorable mention for a piece titled "(e)motion" — the same title that, seven years later, became track two of his debut leader album. That gap is not incidental. Tiberio has said the ten songs on that record were "written across an entire decade" of his life.

In September 2021, Tiberio released his debut album as a leader, Rare Peace, on Outside In Music, playing electric upright bass, guitar, and vocals across all ten tracks alongside alto saxophonist Nathan Reising, pianist Lex Korten, drummer Evan Hyde, and guest tenor saxophonist Morgan Guerin. He has described the record as a response to "modern existence" — an attempt to locate, amid the era's chaos and distrust, the "small moments of grace and serenity where humanity shines through the adversity," and to trace the "emotional bonds that lie silently present between any two souls on Earth." At the album's release show at The Jazz Gallery that same month, he put it more personally, describing a lifelong sensitivity to "the emotional auras of people around me" and a compositional aim to hold both shared suffering and "the connection, the joy" in the same frame. Rare Peace drew a strongly favorable review from Jazz Weekly, which described the band's sound as carrying a "Metheny-esque majesty" and singled out Tiberio's own playing as "lyrical," moving between aggression and grace from one composition to the next.

Tiberio's playing sits within the contemporary post-bop mainstream of New York's working jazz scene, but it's shaped by an unusually wide range of sideman settings — Joel Ross's harmonically adventurous, vibraphone-led writing on one end, Ari Hoenig's rhythmically intricate, standards-rooted trio on the other, with Chad Lefkowitz-Brown's chamber-jazz string arrangements and María Grand's and Ben Wendel's more exploratory postbop in between. As a leader, Rare Peace shows a different side entirely: Tiberio moves off double bass and onto electric upright bass, layering in his own guitar and voice, and the resulting sound has been described as carrying real melodic ambition — spacious, atmospheric writing closer to Pat Metheny's expansive lyricism than to a straight-ahead session-bassist's date. That dual identity — reliable, in-demand acoustic sideman on other people's records, exploratory singer-composer-multi-instrumentalist on his own — is the throughline of his output so far.