Tali Rubinstein began recorder in elementary school, encouraged by teacher Ilana Hiller, and trained in baroque and early-music technique under Bracha Kol, a noted Israeli recorder player and mezzo-soprano. She attended the Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts, then, during a planned sabbatical from mathematics and classical-music study at Tel Aviv University, auditioned for the Rimon School of Jazz and Contemporary Music — an audition that required improvising over a jazz tune, her first real exposure to the idiom, and a turning point that redirected her career. She studied jazz further with flautist Ilan Salem before winning a full scholarship to Berklee College of Music in Boston, reportedly the first recorder player admitted to the school; she graduated with honors in 2014, receiving the W.S. Kenney award.

She became a long-running collaborator of Grammy-winning Spanish flamenco producer Javier Limón, recording for his label Casa Limón, and co-leads the duo Tal y Tali with Israeli pianist Tal Even-Tzur — a project that has featured Anat Cohen on clarinet on the track "Ima," an Anat Cohen composition. She is credited on soprano recorder and voice on the album OQ (2018) with her Original Quartet, alongside violinist Layth Sidiq and vocalist Shilpa Ananth; on Tonina's Black Angel (2018); and on both volumes of pianist Alain Mallet's Mutt Slang project (2016, 2020, the latter on Origin Records). She contributed to Entre 20 Aguas: A La Música de Paco de Lucía (2015), a Latin Grammy-winning tribute album, and has performed with Alejandro Sanz, Tomatito, Mariza, Chick Corea, Dhafer Youssef and Michel Camilo, among others, at venues including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center and Birdland, touring more than fifteen countries. In January 2019 Israeli press reported she had appeared on Barack Obama's published list of his favorite songs of 2018. Alongside performing, she has produced educational content for Carnegie Hall and a Nickelodeon/SpongeBob SquarePants series, and has composing credits on at least two films.

Rubinstein's career is built around a genuinely rare pairing: baroque-trained recorder technique applied to jazz and flamenco contexts, most concretely through her long association with Javier Limón's flamenco-jazz world and her explicit "Recorder, Voice" studio credits on real jazz-adjacent releases. JazzTimes profiled her specifically on the strength of this specialization — an unusual-instrument case this project has found tends to be unusually well documented, and her career bears that out.