Dani Benedikt was born September 29, 1970, in Nahariya, on Israel's northern coast, and started young: at age 7 he was already a classical percussionist in the Nahariya Youth Orchestra under conductor Arie Kfir, touring Germany with the orchestra at 10. He stopped formal lessons at 12 to compete as a surfer, a detour that lasted until he joined the Israeli army at 18. The pull back to music returned before his service ended, and afterward he worked night jobs for two years to fund weekly drum lessons in Tel Aviv with Rony Holan, who moved him first through the Head music school and then into Rimon School of Music in Ramat HaSharon, telling him, by Benedikt's own account, "here you will have people to play with." Three years at Rimon led to a scholarship at Berklee College of Music in Boston.

He returned to Israel at the end of 1998 when his father, Jacob Benedikt, fell ill, and formed the Latin jazz band Elegua, which played the Red Sea Jazz Festival in Eilat in 1999. In 2001 he co-founded Hagiga with saxophonist Alon Farber, a Tel Aviv ensemble built around Farber's compositions that fold Moroccan, funk, Brazilian and swing idioms into a jazz frame; Benedikt anchored the group's drum chair across its first phase, documented on Exposure (2005, Fresh Sound New Talent, credited to the Alon Farber Hagiga Quintet, featuring trumpeter Avishai Cohen (Trumpet) as a guest on three tracks) and Optimistic View (2007, Fresh Sound New Talent, expanded to a sextet with pianist Omri Mor and guitarist/oudist Amos Hoffman). The partnership culminated in New Directions, billed on release as by "Alon Farber - Dani Benedikt Hagiga Sextet" (a rare co-billing that reflects Benedikt's account of having formed the whole record jointly with Farber, contributing two of its compositions), with pianists Gadi Lehavi and Tomer Bar splitting the piano chair and bassist Assaf Hakimi in the rhythm section; Benedikt has described it as his last album with Hagiga before striking out as a leader.

Alongside Hagiga, Benedikt built a parallel career as an in-demand Tel Aviv sideman through the 2000s and 2010s: percussion and drums on two Makondo albums (2005-2006, an Israeli world-jazz sextet led by saxophonist Ofer Peled), a Latin jazz session for singer/bassist Fernando Knopf (2006, alongside a young Shai Maestro on piano), pianist Dan Cahn's trio session Toreadore (2008), Itamar Erez's world-music date Hommage (2012, with Turkish ney player Omar Faruk Tekbilek as a guest), and vocalist Ayelet Rose Gottlieb's Roadsides (2013, setting Yehuda Amichai poems, with Anat Fort appearing on the closing track and rock singer Alon Oleartchik as a guest vocalist). In July 2010 he also recorded drums and percussion on Peacemaker, the Electroacoustic Band album led by saxophonist Albert Beger, alongside guitarist Ido Bukelman, bassist Assaf Hakimi and electronics player Avi Elbaz, cut live over two days at Anova Music's Tel Aviv studio.

Benedikt started composing in 2011 and released his first record as a leader that year, Dani Benedikt Trio Featuring Anat Fort & Tal Ronen, a set of ten originals recorded at Pluto Studios, Tel Aviv, with bassist Tal Ronen and pianist Anat Fort, plus guest spots from Beger (tenor saxophone, one track), alto saxophonist Hagai Amir and percussionist Joca Perpignan. The trio's billing later shrank to a working unit of Benedikt, Ronen and guitarist Tomer Sasson, revisiting some of the same repertoire (including the title track "Freeway") on a 2023 EP, and expanding to a quartet with saxophonist Yuval Drabkin for Leaves (2024), a live, largely improvised session recorded at Benedikt's own studio in Gan Shmuel and dedicated to Tony Williams, mixing standards ("You Must Believe in Spring," Ornette Coleman's "When Will the Blues Leave") with drum features and two Williams-referencing originals. In 2020 he began a solo project built around a drum-and-percussion looper, released under the title "Curiosity," and in 2025 he released a duo recording, "Este Seu Olhar," with guitarist Yotam Silberstein. A separate duo album with Brazilian musician Ba Freyre, Offside, was recorded roughly a decade earlier and released only in February 2021, dedicated to Freyre's memory after his death that year. Most recently, Benedikt plays drums and percussion in Zurhub, an Israeli quintet whose 2025 album Countryside Moterways appeared on the American label Origin Records, alongside bassist Assaf Hakimi.

Benedikt's own description of his playing, "creative sound, versatility, high energy," matches a catalog built as much on Latin, Brazilian and North African grooves as on straight-ahead swing: Elegua's Latin jazz, Makondo and Flower Shop's Afro-Brazilian palettes, and Hagiga's Moroccan-funk hybrid sit alongside more conventional post-bop dates like his own trio. His most explicit stated influence is drummer Tony Williams, to whom he dedicated the 2024 Leaves session; his teacher Rony Holan and Berklee's faculty and students shaped his early technical development after a late start relative to most professional jazz drummers (he did not resume serious study until his early twenties, after national service).