Roberto Negro was born in Turin, Italy, on May 28, 1981, and spent his childhood in Kinshasa, in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where he began piano lessons around age 5 and attended French school. He moved to France in 1995, earning a jazz diploma at the Conservatoire a rayonnement regional de Chambery before relocating to Paris in 2008, where he studied with guitarist Marc Ducret, pianist Denis Badault and pianist Benoit Delbecq. His earliest Discogs-documented recording as a leader came in 2009 with the Roberto Negro Trio, a group with saxophonist Lucas Saint-Cricq, bassist Jerome Arrighi and drummer Adrien Chennebault; their album Downtown Sorry (2010) features Negro on piano and glockenspiel.

In 2011 Negro co-founded Tricollectif, a musicians' collective based in Orleans that became the production framework for much of his subsequent work. Chennebault reappears alongside violinist Theo Ceccaldi and cellist Valentin Ceccaldi in the quartet La Scala, whose self-titled album (2014, Ayler Records) is a fully improvised, jointly composed session. The same year Negro released his first proper leader date, Loving Suite pour Birdy So (2014, Viva La Mamma / La Curieuse / Tricollectif), a setting of texts by Xavier Machault for singer Elise Caron, violinist Theo Ceccaldi, cellist Valentin Ceccaldi, guitarist Federico Casagrande and bassist Nicolas Bianco. Negro and Theo Ceccaldi went on to record two duo albums, Babies (2015, Le Triton / Tricollectif) and Montevago (2019, Full Rhizome / Brouhaha), and Negro led the trio session Garibaldi Plop (2017, Tricollectif) with Valentin Ceccaldi on cello and Sylvain Darrifourcq on drums.

Negro's highest-profile group is DaDaDa, a trio with soprano saxophonist Emile Parisien and percussionist Michele Rabbia; its album Saison 3 (2017, Label Bleu) was named a "coup de coeur" by the Academie Charles-Cros and won "Album sensation de l'annee" at the 2018 Victoires du Jazz. Negro's solo album Kings and Bastards (2018, C.A.M. Jazz), built from piano and live electronics, followed, and in 2020 he reunited with Parisien and Rabbia, adding Valentin Ceccaldi on bass, for the quartet album Papier Ciseau (Label Bleu). In 2022 he recorded Music for Two Upright Pianos (Hector / Merci Pour Le Poisson / Full Rhizome) with drummer and prepared-piano partner Sylvain Darrifourcq, and the same year he appears on piano on Louise (ACT), the sextet album led by Parisien with trumpeter Theo Croker, guitarist Manu Codjia, bassist Joe Martin and drummer Nasheet Waits. Negro and Parisien then recorded as a duo on Les Metanuits (2023, ACT), another Academie Charles-Cros "coup de coeur."

Alongside his own groups, Negro is a longtime member of saxophonist Christophe Monniot's Kimono quartet and of the Grand Orchestre du Tricot, and he appears on several albums by trumpeter David Enhco (La Horde, 2013; Layers, 2014; Horizons, 2017) and on Happy Meal (2015) by the group What About Sam?. In 2024 he was commissioned by the Ensemble intercontemporain for Newborn (Parco della Musica Records), a large-ensemble piece again featuring Rabbia on percussion and electronics. Outside jazz proper, Negro has composed for the theater company Les Veilleurs since 2015 and received the Italian SIAE Prize in 2020 for his composing work. He continues to divide his work between small-group jazz improvisation and commissioned contemporary-ensemble writing, based in France.

Negro's catalog sits at the boundary between composed contemporary music and free improvisation, built almost entirely around duo, trio and quartet settings rather than conventional swing-based combos: Discogs tags nearly every one of his leader and co-leader releases as Jazz, with Avant-Garde Jazz, Contemporary Jazz and Free Improvisation as the recurring style descriptors. His regular use of electronics alongside acoustic piano, audible from Kings and Bastards (2018) onward, and his preference for chamber-scale instrumentation, piano and violin, piano and saxophone, two prepared pianos, place him closer to the European free-improvisation and new-music scenes than to the American postbop mainstream. That same instinct carries into his commissioned work for the Ensemble intercontemporain and for theater, where notated composition and improvisation are treated as a single continuum rather than separate disciplines.