Ido Bukelman was born in Israel in 1981 and has said he began experimenting with the tonal possibilities of the guitar around age twelve. He came up inside Tel Aviv's small, close-knit free-improvised music community in the mid-2000s, and his earliest documented recording is a 2006 session with the group Rats Quartet, Afternoon High, cut at Bardo Studios in Tel Aviv alongside tenor saxophonist Yonatan "Yoni" Kretzmer, on which Bukelman played electric guitar and co-wrote several pieces. That partnership with Kretzmer proved lasting: around 2010 Bukelman joined Kretzmer and bassist/producer Yair Yona in founding OutNow Recordings, a Tel Aviv-rooted label devoted to free jazz and improvised music that went on to release the bulk of Bukelman's own catalog as well as records by Ehran Elisha, Gerry Hemingway, and other musicians working in Albert Beger's circle. Bukelman appears on OutNow's roster both as a performer and, on several releases by labelmates, as executive producer rather than a player.

His own leader catalog began in earnest in 2011, an unusually productive year in which OutNow and the Jerusalem-based Kadima Collective issued three separate Bukelman records: the unaccompanied acoustic-guitar album Solo; The Door, eleven solo pieces recorded at Kadima's Jerusalem studio on acoustic guitar, banjo, and percussion; and Ido Bukelman's Cracked Song, a quintet-scaled session (recorded February 2010) that added cellist Yuval Mesner, bassist Assaf Hakimi, and drummer/percussionist Udi Shlomo, closing with a version of the Beatles' "Julia." That same year he also recorded electric guitar on Peacemaker, the 2010 album by Albert Beger's Electroacoustic Band for the Israeli label Anova Music, playing alongside bassist Assaf Hakimi, drummer Dani Benedikt, and electronics player Avi Elbaz on a session recorded live at Anova's Tel Aviv studio in July 2010.

Alongside his solo work, Bukelman built a run of working duos and trios through the 2010s. With bassist Nadav Masel he formed the duo Ground Birds, documented on a self-titled 2015 OutNow release recorded in Jerusalem; the two also anchor the free jazz Hanut Trio with percussionist Nir Sabag, named for a small Tel Aviv venue, whose 2015 self-titled album found Bukelman on electric guitar. With drummer Ofer Bymel and electronics player Daniel Davidovsky he co-led EFT (Electro Free Trio), releasing Bukelman / Davidovsky / Bymel in 2011 and Spatial Awareness in 2014, both taped live in Tel Aviv and blending free improvisation with electronic textures. From 2017 onward Bukelman also developed a European strand of his work, recording Frankfurter Tor Berlin 2017 as a banjo-and-cello duo with Portuguese cellist Guilherme Rodrigues, and then extending that partnership into a trio and quartet with Rodrigues's father, violist and Creative Sources label founder Ernesto Rodrigues, on the digital releases Exodus (2018), Mosaic (2018), and Straw (2020, adding bassist Antti Virtaranta), all recorded in Berlin.

Bukelman relocated to Berlin, and his most recent releases document a return to unaccompanied playing after several years of live European touring: Then I heard the clear voice of the flute (2025, Torto Editions / Ramble Records), his tenth solo album by the label's own count, was recorded in a Berlin studio in October 2023 on bowed banjo and acoustic guitar and includes his first recorded vocal track and a setting of "The Flute," a folk song by the Israeli composer David Zehavi. Beyond performing, Bukelman teaches guitar and improvisation and coaches ensembles working in free improvisation, and in 2021 he published his debut poetry collection, Melodic Move, which won an award for first books.

Bukelman's guitar and banjo playing runs between two poles: a dense, exploratory extended-technique language built up since childhood, and, in his more recent solo work, a deliberate turn toward what he has described as greater melodic and rhythmic clarity, informed by years spent researching Middle Eastern folk music. Critics have singled him out as an unusually song-minded improviser for the free scene, and reviewers have described his solo acoustic playing as tightly wound and assured even at its most abstract. His bowed-banjo technique, heard on The Door and the Rodrigues-family collaborations, produces a rough, distorted timbre that contrasts with the clarity of his straight acoustic-guitar work. He has performed with an international range of improvisers including Steve Swell, Günter "Baby" Sommer, Mark Sanders, and Mikołaj Trzaska, alongside his core Israeli working groups.