Duduka Da Fonseca was born Eduardo Moreira Da Fonseca in Rio de Janeiro on March 31, 1951, and started playing drums at thirteen. At fourteen he formed the Bossa Trio with his brother Miguel, an early sign of the family and hometown roots that would stay audible in his playing for the next six decades. In the early 1970s he co-founded the samba jazz sextet Mandengo in Rio, part of a generation of Brazilian musicians translating samba and bossa nova rhythm into a small-group jazz vocabulary before most of them had ever set foot in New York.

Da Fonseca made that move in 1975, relocating to New York City to work directly alongside the American jazz musicians he'd been absorbing from records. The city rewarded him: over the following decades he built one of the most extensive sideman resumes of any Brazilian musician in American jazz, recording and performing with Antonio Carlos Jobim, Herbie Mann, Joe Henderson, John Scofield, Gerry Mulligan, Phil Woods, Kenny Barron, Lee Konitz, Eddie Gomez, Wayne Shorter, Airto Moreira, Astrud Gilberto, Milton Nascimento, and Elza Soares, among many others. Several of those connections are documented directly: Phil Woods plays alto saxophone on Da Fonseca's own Songs From The Last Century (2005), and Kenny Barron leads Da Fonseca's regular trio as his own backing band on Canta Brasil (2002). He also led his own New York-based Brazilian ensembles in these years, including Brazilian Express — which had a PBS television broadcast in 1981 — and the Brazilian Jazz All Stars, formed in 1986. From 1984 to 2000 he taught at the Drummers Collective in Manhattan, and he later wrote the widely used instructional book Brazilian Rhythms for Drumset (Alfred Publishing), extending his influence past his own drum kit and into how the vocabulary is formally taught.

The most consequential move of that period came in 1986, when he co-founded Trio da Paz with bassist Nilson Matta and guitarist Romero Lubambo. Working continuously for close to four decades, the group has become one of the most respected working units in Brazilian jazz, with nine studio albums to date: Brasil From The Inside (1992), Black Orpheus (1994) — which brought in flutist Herbie Mann as a guest, alongside percussionists Naná Vasconcelos and Cyro Baptista — Partido Out (1998), Cafe (2002), Somewhere (2005), Harry Allen Meets Trio Da Paz (2007), Night Of My Beloved (2008), Live At JazzBaltica (2008), and 30 (2016), marking the trio's thirtieth anniversary. Partido Out won the Jazz Journalists Association Award for Best Brazilian Jazz Album in 2002, and 30 was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Latin Jazz Album at the 59th Annual Grammy Awards in early 2017.

That Grammy nod for 30 was one of several across Da Fonseca's career. His 2002 solo debut, Samba Jazz Fantasia, was nominated for a Grammy the same year — making him, by his own label's account, one of very few Brazilians and the only Brazilian drummer nominated in that category at the time. In 2009 he picked up a Latin Grammy nomination as co-leader of The Brazilian Trio, alongside pianist Helio Alves and bassist Nilson Matta, for their album Forests. And in 2019 he was the drummer on Sorte!, composer John Finbury's collaboration with Brazilian singer Thalma de Freitas, which was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Latin Jazz Album at the 62nd Annual Grammy Awards in early 2020 — his fourth Grammy-related nomination in total.

Alongside Trio da Paz, Da Fonseca has kept multiple other projects running. The Duduka Da Fonseca Quintet, formed in 2002 with clarinetist and saxophonist Anat Cohen, pianist Helio Alves, guitarist Guilherme Monteiro, and bassist Leonardo Cioglia, released Samba Jazz – Jazz Samba (2012), named among the year's ten best albums by Jazziz Magazine. A separate Duduka Da Fonseca Trio, formed with rotating pianists, released Plays Toninho Horta (2011), Jive Samba (2015), and Plays Dom Salvador (2018). In 2022 he introduced Duduka Da Fonseca & Quarteto Universal with the album "Yes!!!" on Sunnyside Records. Most recently, in February 2025, he released Rio Fantasia, recorded the year before in Rio de Janeiro with pianist David Feldman and bassist Guto Wirtti — a homecoming record, made with the musicians he plays with when he's back in Brazil, that closes a circle running from the Rio clubs he started in as a teenager back to Rio itself.

Now well into his sixth decade behind the kit, Da Fonseca has appeared on well over 100 recordings as a sideman in addition to his own extensive catalog as a leader, and is widely regarded as one of the most recorded Brazilian drummers in the history of American jazz.

Da Fonseca's playing is built on the rhythmic vocabulary of his native Rio de Janeiro — samba, partido alto, baião, and bossa nova — adapted to the small-group jazz format rather than treated as an exotic add-on to it. That adaptation is the whole premise of Trio da Paz's nearly forty-year partnership with Nilson Matta and Romero Lubambo, and it's audible across his sideman work too: American musicians as different as Herbie Mann, Kenny Barron, and John Scofield each drew on his ability to make Brazilian time feel native to a straight-ahead jazz setting rather than a guest dialect within it. His decades teaching at the Drummers Collective and his instructional book on Brazilian drumset technique reflect the same instinct pushed one step further — not just playing the vocabulary, but formalizing how it gets taught to drummers who didn't grow up with it.