Lieven Venken grew up in Belgium in a musical household and started on the violin at four. Percussion came later and took over, and by the time he reached the Lemmensinstituut in Leuven he arrived as a classical violinist and percussionist before moving across to the school's jazz department, where he studied with the Belgian drummer Dré Pallemaerts. He graduated in 1999, cum laude. Alongside that he took further study in Amsterdam, with a teacher his own biography names as Kees Cranenburg, and made a trip to New York in 1997 for private lessons with three drummers who between them define most of the post-1990 American vocabulary on the instrument: Billy Hart, Brian Blade and Jorge Rossy. He then spent two consecutive Augusts, 1997 and 1998, at the summer jazz clinic in Dworp, Belgium, where Hart taught drums and Mark Levine ran the ensembles. Hart has been a fixture at Dworp for years, and it is the point where the two men's careers actually touch.

He came out of the conservatory straight into work. The saxophone trio he formed with the American saxophonist Jonathan Moritz and the bassist Lindsey Horner recorded Xanadu in January 2000, and in 2001 he was the drummer on Streams, the co-led Diederik Wissels and Bart Defoort quartet album for Igloo. He also took the drum chair in the High Voltage Sextet, the post-bop band led by the trumpeter Nico Schepers, and in 2000 the group won the SABAM prize for Belgian Artistic Promotion, the B.A.P. award. Belgian radio caught much of the rest of that period that never reached a record: a Bart Van Caenegem trio broadcast on Radio Klara in June 2001, a Kris Defoort quartet with Mark Turner that February, High Voltage taped live at De Werf in Bruges in May 2001, a Steve Houben quartet cut at the VRT's Studio Toots that November, and the Jef Neve Trio live in Lier in May 2002. He also worked in Erwin Vann's Worlds project in its sextet form, alongside the English singer Norma Winstone, the Dutch trumpeter Eric Vloeimans, the pianist Michel Herr and the bassist Stefan Lievestro. The one substantial job outside jazz came in the same stretch, a Belgian benefit tour and live gospel album, Gospels for Damien, with the American singer Lea Gilmore.

In 2002 he moved to New York. By his own account of those years he worked the city's jazz rooms with the Brooklyn Big Band, with the saxophonists Tim Armacost and Gregory Tardy, and with Toots Thielemans, Belgium's most exported jazz musician; the trumpeter Claudio Roditi and Mark Turner appear in the same list of freelance associations from either side of the Atlantic. The New York period also produced the record he is now best known for outside Belgium, although nobody knew it at the time. He met the Israeli pianist Anat Fort and the American bassist Rene Hart in the early 2000s, the three formed a collective on the spot, and in 2005 they spent two days in a New York studio. The tapes were shelved. Closer to home he turned up as one of four drummers on Lindsey Horner's Don't Count On Glory for Cadence Jazz, recorded across 2003 and 2004, playing a single piece of the eight.

Back in Europe, his catalogue since has been steady and almost entirely jazz. He drummed on Manuel Hermia's Rajazz for Igloo in 2006, and on two albums with the South African singer Tutu Puoane, Quiet Now in 2009, where he also shared the production credit with the rest of the quartet, and Breathe in 2012. The Hammond organ group GrooveTHing, with Jef Neve, Nicolas Kummert and Nicolas Thys, recorded THe Love Album live at Brussels's Ancienne Belgique in 2009 and included two of his tunes. Talking To The Mlouk with the Axel Gilain Quartet followed in 2014, and in December 2017 he cut Shifted with the Sal La Rocca Quartet, a co-production of Igloo and el NEGOCITO that put one of his compositions, "Waiting", into a Coltrane-shaded modern quartet setting.

The 2005 tapes finally surfaced by accident. The compositions came back up during a later session between Venken and the Brussels bassist Giuseppe Millaci, who runs Hypnote Records; Hypnote released the session as Bubbles on 1 February 2019, fourteen years after it was made, with Millaci co-producing. Two years after that, Millaci and the French guitarist Manu Codjia joined Venken as co-leaders of the trio that recorded Phases for the same label. He also leads a trio under his own name, with Jozef Dumoulin on Fender Rhodes and Eric Surmenian on double bass, and has been the standing drummer in the Ramon van Merkenstein Trio across three albums: Quiet Dreams in 2021, Waiting For A Summer Storm in 2024 and, backing the singer and pianist Sara So Far, the Vertical EP released in March 2026. Belgian jazz listings through 2026 place him at Brussels's Toots Jazz Club and on the Mechelen festival circuit, working in Europe rather than New York.

Venken belongs to the generation of European drummers who came up through Dré Pallemaerts and then went to New York for the rest, and the American half of that education is unusually specific: Billy Hart, Brian Blade and Jorge Rossy, three players whose shared inheritance is a loose, conversational touch and a preference for shading a soloist rather than marking the bar. What that produces in his own playing is a kit used as a full instrument instead of a timekeeping device. Reviewing Bubbles for Jazz'halo, Claude Loxhay picked out the range of it within a single record: brushes and a bass introduction under the ballads, mallets working across cymbals on the closing piece, hard swing on the up-tempo material, and free playing on the group's cover of The Police, with the whole thing held as a genuine three-way trio rather than a rhythm section behind a piano. The French magazine Jazz Hot had reached a similar view of him much earlier, placing him in 2001 among the most sought-after drummers in Belgium on the strength of an original and attentive approach. He is also a working composer rather than an occasional one: he wrote the title track of Bubbles outright and co-wrote four more of its ten pieces, contributed two originals and three co-written movements to Phases, and has placed single tunes on records by the High Voltage Sextet, Quatre, GrooveTHing and the Sal La Rocca Quartet.