Ofri Nehemya was born in Givatayim, just east of Tel Aviv, on January 10, 1994, to two musicians: his father a drummer, his mother a singer. He was on the drums by around age three. From eight to twelve his father taught him directly, mostly fusion, and at twelve he added classical and jazz piano lessons, which gave him a working grasp of harmony and composition well before he had any use for it as a bandleader.

At fifteen he entered the jazz department at Thelma-Yellin, the state high school for the arts in Givatayim that has produced a large share of the musicians in this scene. He studied arrangement, ear training and theory there, spent four years in the school big band, and started playing professionally around the city while still enrolled. In the summer of 2011 he spent five weeks at Berklee College of Music in Boston under drummers Terri Lyne Carrington and Ralph Peterson, and came away with the offer of a full four-year scholarship.

The scholarship turned out to be less consequential than the phone calls. At seventeen he joined the band of saxophonist Eli Degibri. At nineteen he joined the touring band of bassist Avishai Cohen, which put him on the major festival circuit before he was twenty. His first recording credit arrived the same year: Degibri's Twelve (Plus Loin Music, August 2013), a quartet date that also happens to be the recording debut of pianist Gadi Lehavi, then seventeen, with Barak Mori on bass. Nehemya returned to the same quartet for Degibri's Cliff Hangin' in 2015.

Two things happened in 2014. He formed his own quartet to play his own compositions, and bassist Avishai Cohen put together All Original, a compilation of young Israeli jazz on his Razdaz Recordz label, handing two of its nine tracks to the Ofri Nehemya Quartet. Those two tracks, "Memories Of A Visionary" and "Break Though," are the earliest released recordings under Nehemya's own name. The quartet would not make an album for another eleven years.

In 2016, at twenty-two, he moved to New York and joined bassist and composer Omer Avital's band, recording Abutbul Music that year and becoming a standing member of Avital's Qantar group, which released Qantar in 2018 and New York Paradox in 2020. The Avital years put him deep into the meeting point of jazz and Middle Eastern music that runs through much of his playing.

Then came ECM. In 2018 Nehemya took the drum chair in pianist Shai Maestro's trio alongside Peruvian bassist Jorge Roeder, and the group recorded The Dream Thief that April in Lugano with Manfred Eicher producing. Released September 28, 2018, the album carried an unusual credit for a label with a strong house style: ECM billed it to Shai Maestro / Jorge Roeder / Ofri Nehemya, three names rather than a leader and a rhythm section. Human followed in January 2021, recorded at Studios La Buissonne in the south of France with trumpeter Philip Dizack added, and closing on a reworking of Duke Ellington's "In A Sentimental Mood." Nehemya returned for Maestro's The Guesthouse in 2026.

2018 also gave him a band of his own making, by accident. A Japanese promoter booked three young Israeli players for a tour without knowing they had been friends since childhood: Lehavi on piano, Tal Mashiach on bass, Nehemya on drums. What they found in rehearsal became the GTO Trio, a genuinely co-led group rather than a piano trio with a rhythm section. They toured Japan and Europe, released From The Road in September 2018, and launched it at the Blue Note in New York. Their second album, Within, arrived January 10, 2025 on Anzic Records, with all three members sharing both a playing and a producing credit across the record's nine tracks.

Alongside that he built a long working relationship with pianist Omri Mor and South African-born bassist Yosef Gutman Levitt, appearing on Upside Down Mountain (2022), which Discogs bills to all three, then Soul Song (2023) with guitarist Lionel Loueke, and Melodies Of Light (2023), a record that grew out of live duo improvisations between Mor and Nehemya before Levitt and Loueke were added.

His own album finally landed on May 2, 2025. Time Traveler, on the small artist-owned New York label Adhyaropa, gathers eight compositions the label describes as written more than a decade earlier, played by a quartet of Nehemya, Tomer Bar on piano, Nitzan Bar on guitar and Tal Mashiach on bass. It is the loudest and most groove-driven record in his catalogue, further from ECM's restraint than anything else he has played on, and it closes with a solo drum piece called "One For Myself" that he kept under three minutes.

Nehemya lives in Brooklyn. He is an endorsing artist for Zildjian cymbals, Vic Firth drumsticks and Remo drumheads.

Nehemya's reputation rests on control rather than volume. Across the two ECM records he is the player who makes a spare arrangement feel rhythmically alive without filling it, which is the specific skill that label's aesthetic demands and the reason Maestro kept him for three albums across eight years. The four years of piano study behind him show up in how he treats form: his own compositions are built around clear melodic material carried by guitar, piano and bass, with the drum features placed deliberately rather than sprinkled through.

His work with Omer Avital's Qantar and on Avital's Abutbul Music put him inside the Middle Eastern and North African rhythmic vocabulary that runs through a large part of the Israeli scene, and he lists it as one of the three streams feeding Time Traveler, along with contemporary jazz and fusion.

That fusion strand is the one most listeners do not expect. On Time Traveler reviewers reached consistently for the 1970s and early 1980s jazz-rock lineage, naming Pat Metheny and John Scofield for the prominence of Nitzan Bar's guitar, and Weather Report, Mahavishnu Orchestra and Return to Forever for the drive. His earliest training under his father was in fusion, so the record reads less as a departure than as a return.