Eviatar Slivnik was born December 6, 1995, in Tel Aviv, and started on drums at eight, entering the after-school program at the Arison School of Arts in Tel Aviv before moving on to the Thelma Yellin High School of Arts, where he graduated in 2013 with a certificate of excellence from the Jazz Department. At fifteen, in September 2011, he got his first international booking, playing the Savannah Jazz Festival in Georgia with the group Sharp 5. Around the same period he picked up the Israeli Ministry of Culture and Sport's Outstanding Musician Award and a Jazz Category scholarship from the America-Israel Cultural Foundation, which he held from 2012 to 2017. His first recording came in 2014, drumming for the young Tel Aviv sextet Jupiter alongside saxophonist Alexander Levin, on two tracks of All Original: Best Young Israeli Jazz, a compilation Avishai Cohen assembled for his Razdaz Recordz label. Between high school and college he also served as a distinguished musician in the Israel Defense Forces jazz ensemble.

From Thelma Yellin he moved to the Rimon Jazz Institute on a program linked to Berklee College of Music, and within his first two years there was already sitting in with Mark Whitfield, Yoni Rechter, Avishai Cohen, Anat Cohen, and, most consequentially, Eli Degibri. He became a regular in Degibri's band, touring Europe and playing rooms and festivals including the Antibes Jazz Festival, the Jarasum Jazz Festival in South Korea, Duc des Lombards in Paris, Café Central in Madrid, Nancy Jazz Pulsations, the Jazz Standard in New York, and Blue Note rooms in Beijing, Milan, and New York, plus Dizzy's Club at Lincoln Center. In February 2015 he won the Best Jazz Performer award at Rimon, which sent him to the International Association of Schools of Jazz conference in Portugal under Dave Liebman. In September 2016 he won a full Berklee scholarship together with a Bracha Foundation award and began studying under Ralph Peterson Jr. and Terence Blanchard, graduating in May 2018 with a Bachelor's degree in Jazz Performance.

He is the drummer on Degibri's Soul Station (2018), a tribute to Hank Mobley's 1960 Blue Note album of the same name, recorded July 5 and 6, 2017, with pianist Tom Oren and bassist Tamir Shmerling rounding out the quartet. Discogs' own release data for that record carries no track restriction on any performer's credit, Slivnik's included, which is the album-wide band credit rather than a guest slot. After Berklee he settled in New York, working the city's clubs (Smalls, Mezzrow, Minton's Playhouse, Zinc Bar, the Jazz Standard) as both a sideman and, increasingly, a bandleader. In 2019 he toured in and out of the city, played a week-long Israeli engagement with an Eli Degibri Quartet featuring Chris Potter, and recorded on Tom Oren's Thelonious Monk Institute Piano Competition-linked album, later released on Concord Jazz. When COVID-19 sent him back to Israel in March 2020 he co-founded Drivin' Jazz, a drive-in concert series, with childhood friend and saxophonist Alexander Levin (the two were born the same day at the same Tel Aviv hospital and came up through the same schools together), hosting sets by Eli Degibri, Shai Maestro, Gilad Hekselman, Yuval Cohen, and Barak Mori among others. The two closed out that Israeli chapter together at the Jerusalem Jazz Festival in June 2021, leading a quartet with Tom Oren on piano in the sculpture garden of the Israel Museum.

In March 2022 he released his debut as a leader, First Out of the Sliv, a self-produced ten-track record with Alexander Levin on tenor saxophone, Tom Oren on piano, Alon Near on bass, and Eli Degibri guesting on soprano saxophone on four of its tracks. He also recorded that period with pianist Andrew Boudreau on Neon (Fresh Sound New Talent, 2022) and with the Israeli-Georgian project Khondzi on the EP Caucasus (2021). His working life since has stayed split between New York and Israel: he is a fixture of the Mezzrow and Smalls stages, playing regularly behind pianists Jon Davis, Steve Ash, and Aaron Goldberg and leading his own quartet dates at Smalls in 2024 and 2026, while continuing to record with Israeli players including trombonist Yonathan Peled (Ox and Sea, both Melech Music, 2023) and Tom Oren again on Dark Lights (Anzic Records, 2026). His most prominent recent credit is the drum chair, alongside Jeff Ballard on three tracks, on bassist Avishai Cohen's Eternal Child (Naïve, 2026), recorded in Meudon, France in January of that year and released that May.

From an eight-year-old at the Arison School to a working New York drummer splitting his time between his own working quartet, one of the city's busiest jazz-club circuits, and international sideman dates on both sides of the Atlantic, Slivnik's career has stayed grounded in the Israeli scene that trained him while building out a genuinely international performing and recording life.

Slivnik came up through the same Israeli jazz-education pipeline that produced much of his generation's New York-based Israeli contingent, and his training reflects it directly: Rimon's Berklee-linked program, then Berklee itself under Ralph Peterson Jr. and Terence Blanchard, two drummers and educators strongly identified with the hard-bop and post-bop mainstream. His time behind Eli Degibri, a saxophonist who names Stan Getz, John Coltrane, and Sonny Rollins as his own touchstones, put him inside a straight-ahead, swing-driven small-group vocabulary for the better part of a decade, and that grounding carries into his own composing on First Out of the Sliv, a quartet record built around original tunes rather than standards. His standing gigs at Mezzrow and Smalls, alongside pianists steeped in the same tradition, place him squarely in New York's contemporary mainstream-jazz circuit rather than in any more experimental corner of the music.