Iris Portugaly grew up in Holon and started playing drums at 14, a choice she has described in the Israeli press as effectively unheard of for a girl in Israel at the time. She went on to study at Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she met pianist Ofer Portugaly in the school's hallways in 1987. The two formed a jazz quartet with two other Boston-based musicians, played local jazz clubs, and married in the summer of 1989. In 1991 they moved back to Israel together to build their careers there.

Working as a duo billed Iris & Ofer Portugaly, the couple developed a sound they call "Israeli jazz," original compositions and reworked standards built around Mediterranean melodic material, Israeli song forms, and Hebrew-language lyrics rather than a straight import of the American jazz songbook. Their self-titled debut album (1994) found an audience as far as Japan, followed by Eden (1995) and Before You Told Me (1998). A 1999 tour to Lagos, Nigeria, arranged through Israel's ambassador there, exposed the duo to gospel music, and Ofer subsequently built a gospel ensemble at the Rimon School of Jazz and Contemporary Music in Ramat HaSharon, where the couple both teach. The resulting "Gospel-Jazz" concert, blending Black American gospel tradition with Hebrew liturgical texts, premiered at the 2001 Red Sea Jazz Festival and became the duo's signature project, running through Gospel Jazz Live (2003), Endless Story (2007), and Adon Haselichot (2013), a jazz and gospel choir arrangement of the Yom Kippur prayer of the same name, also released under the English title Master of Forgiveness. Per the duo's own Apple Music artist listing, they released a new single, "Let My People Go!," in April 2025, their most recently confirmed release.

Alongside her performing career, Portugaly built a parallel career in jazz education. She headed the vocal department at the Rimon School of Jazz and Contemporary Music from 2001 to 2014, when she was appointed the school's academic director, and separately founded and ran a dedicated music track at Herzliya High School for 14 years in partnership with Rimon, work that earned her the Herzliya Municipality's annual education commendation in June 2010. Among her vocal students at Rimon was Israeli jazz vocalist Julia Feldman, who studied voice technique and jazz improvisation under Portugaly beginning in 1997 and continuing through 1998 and 1999, before forming her own acclaimed ensemble. Portugaly has also spoken publicly about gender in jazz: a 2017 Ynet feature profile, headlined "I'm a woman, a drummer, and a manager. Deal with it," quotes her on how few Israeli women who show drumming talent in school continue into adulthood, and on the near-total male dominance of music production, alongside her own view that toughness and femininity are not in conflict.

The Portugalys' live work has also brought them together with other Israeli jazz musicians beyond their own duo billing. In 2014 they performed a one-time collaborative show, "CoverDiscover," at the Red Sea Jazz Festival with bassist Yossi Fine, by then the festival's own artistic director, and percussionist Ben Aylon, mixing original material with new arrangements of Israeli and American standards. Separately, Discogs' own session-credit data documents Portugaly singing on pianist Yaron Gottfried's 2008 album The Baroque Jazz Project, on a live segment recorded at the Kfar Saba auditorium in 2007. A 2018 Calcalist feature on the couple also names Alon Oleartchik, Danny Litani, Ruti Navon, and Shlomi Shabat among artists they have collaborated with over the years, without tying any one of those names to a specific dated recording; of that group, Alon Oleartchik (the Kaveret co-founder with his own documented jazz background) is the only one already profiled on this site, and that connection is noted here without a specific credited release to point to (see notes.md).

Portugaly's musical identity sits at the intersection of two traditions she and her husband deliberately fused rather than kept separate: American jazz, learned at Berklee, and the Black American gospel tradition, absorbed on a single 1999 trip to Nigeria and then folded into Hebrew liturgical and folk material back home. That fusion, which the duo built into a recurring "Gospel-Jazz" stage show rather than a one-off experiment, sets her apart from most Israeli jazz vocalists working in a straight-standards idiom. As a working drummer as well as a vocalist, and one of relatively few women in that chair in Israeli jazz, she has also used her platform, both from the bandstand and from her academic post at Rimon, to speak directly about structural gender imbalances in jazz performance and production.