Umberto Petrin was born in Broni, in Italy's Lombardy region, on July 15, 1960. As a teenager he studied chemistry alongside the piano, earning a conservatory diploma, and at the same time built a parallel career as a poet, publishing two collections, contributing to literary magazines and winning several poetry competitions. He began performing jazz professionally in 1984, leading his own trio, and within a few years was noticed by musicians and critics: in 1989 he was invited into the touring group of singer Tiziana Ghiglioni, with whom he worked until 1996.

Petrin's discography as a leader runs to more than fifteen albums. His 1990 trio session Other Line, co-billed with trumpeter Guido Mazzon and drummer Tiziano Tononi, was followed in 1992 by Ooze, again with Mazzon and Tononi. His international profile grew with Breaths And Whispers (Homage To Alexandr Skrjabin) (1995, Philology), a duo record with the American alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, and Monk's World (1997, Splasc(H)), a solo piano tribute to Thelonious Monk whose liner booklet carried a poem by Amiri Baraka. Ellissi (1999) added the American alto saxophonist Tim Berne as a guest alongside bassist Giovanni Maier and drummer Roberto Dani, and Voir Loin (2001) paired Petrin, Maier and Dani with Israeli-American reedman Assif Tsahar and the poet Milo De Angelis as a speaking guest.

From 1997 to 2009 Petrin was a member of the Italian Instabile Orchestra, the large collective ensemble that toured internationally and brought together much of Italy's avant-garde jazz scene, including Enrico Rava, Gianluigi Trovesi, Paolo Damiani, Pino Minafra, Daniele Cavallanti, Carlo Actis Dato, Giancarlo Schiaffini, Eugenio Colombo, Emanuele Parrini and Alberto Mandarini. On a 2002 Instabile Orchestra session, Previsioni Del Tempo / Forecast, he also appears alongside Antonello Salis and Achille Succi. Since 2000 Petrin has also led a long-running duo and trio with clarinetist and saxophonist Gianluigi Trovesi, recording Vaghissimo Ritratto (2007) for ECM with percussionist Fulvio Maras, a widely praised album, and Twelve Colours And Synesthetic Cells (2017, Dodicilune), a second homage to Scriabin. A 2006 duo with French trumpeter Jean-Luc Cappozzo produced Law Years (Soul Note, 2007).

Since 2001 Petrin has scored restored silent films for Milan's Cineteca Italiana, and in 2004 he built a touring performance piece, Beuys Voice, for piano, electronics and video with Lucrezia De Domizio around a late video work by the German artist Joseph Beuys; the piece was performed roughly fifteen times at European festivals and museums, including the 52nd Venice Biennale, the ancient Greek amphitheater at Sparta, the Auditori in Girona and Zurich's Kunsthaus, and became a book and CD, published by Mondadori Electa in 2011, with soprano Susie Georgiadis. From 1999 Petrin also built a long artistic partnership with the novelist Stefano Benni, recording Particles (2003) and Misterioso (2004, Feltrinelli), a second Monk-themed project, and later setting T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land to music with Benni as reciter.

Petrin's solo piano records of the 2010s drew significant critical notice: A Dawn Will Come (2011, Leo Records) was reviewed favorably in France's Jazz Magazine and Belgium's Free Jazz magazine and was named among the best albums of 2011 in a U.S. critics' poll conducted by CultureCatch, and Traces And Ghosts (2014, Leo Records) was named a "Disco CHOC" pick by the French magazine Jazz Magazine-Jazzman. In 2011 he performed an entire program of Cecil Taylor's compositions, solo, at the Iseo Jazz festival, and in 2012 and 2014 he played solo at The Stone and the Spectrum venues in New York. Petrin has also given a series of performances tied to Italy's Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare and CERN's science festivals. More recently he has co-led the quartet Lunatics, with drummer Francesco D'Auria, saxophonist Tino Tracanna and guitarist Roberto Cecchetto (Lunatics, 2022, Caligola), and recorded Everybody Dance - The Music Of Chic (2022), a tribute album with bassist Danilo Gallo and drummer Ferdinando Faraò released as a Musica Jazz magazine covermount. His most recent solo piano release is The Spectrum - Live In NYC (2025).

Petrin's piano playing spans the full range of jazz vocabulary from inside-the-tradition tribute projects to open free improvisation, a duality visible across his own discography: Discogs tags his leader catalog Free Jazz, Contemporary Jazz, Free Improvisation and, on the Lee Konitz duo record, Cool Jazz. His recurring tribute projects, to Thelonious Monk (twice, in 1997 and 2004), to Alexandr Scriabin (twice, with Gianluigi Trovesi in 2007 and 2017) and to Cecil Taylor (the 2011 Iseo Jazz solo program), show a pianist who works through the history of the instrument rather than settling into one idiom. That range is matched by an unusually wide set of extra-musical partnerships: a long-running project scoring silent films, the multi-year Beuys Voice performance built around video art, and an ongoing double career as a published poet, all of which place him at the intersection of Italian free jazz and a broader culture of literary and visual collaboration. His core working circle, built mostly around duos and trios with a single close partner, includes the Italian Instabile Orchestra generation of Italian free improvisers as well as visiting American and international voices such as Lee Konitz, Tim Berne, Assif Tsahar and Jean-Luc Cappozzo.