Mark Guiliana grew up in Florham Park, New Jersey, and discovered drumming the way a lot of kids did in the mid-1990s: watching Matt Cameron of Soundgarden, Dave Grohl in Nirvana, and Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers on MTV. Jazz came a little later, through his first drum teacher, Joe Bergamini, in high school. Hearing Tony Williams with the Miles Davis Quintet did what it does to a lot of drummers who go on to build a career around it — it rearranged something. Elvin Jones, Max Roach, Art Blakey, Roy Haynes, and Jack DeJohnette followed close behind. Williams and Jones stayed the two poles he keeps returning to.

He studied jazz at William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey, graduating in 2003. A few months later, bassist Avishai Cohen brought him into his touring trio — the same route into the professional world that pianist Shai Maestro would later travel through the same group. Guiliana played and recorded with Cohen from 2003 to 2008, appearing on six studio albums (including Lyla, At Home, Continuo, and Gently Disturbed) and a live DVD taped at the Blue Note in New York.

In 2004, alongside bassist Neal Persiani and saxophonist Zac Colwell, he formed Heernt, a trio that folded a cajón, a trombone, and a typewriter into its percussion arsenal. Their one album, Locked In A Basement (2006, Sunnyside/Razdaz), drew an AllMusic description of "the more melodic side of avant-garde jazz." It was also the start of Guiliana's real education in electronic sound — a thread that would define his next decade as a leader.

That thread became Beat Music, the outlet Guiliana built through his own label, Beat Music Productions: the Beat Music EP (2012), A Form of Truth and its promotional advance (2013), the improv session Beat Music: The Los Angeles Improvisations and its companion My Life Starts Now (both 2014), and eventually the full-length Beat Music! Beat Music! Beat Music! (2019, Motéma), which earned a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album. All About Jazz called him, on the strength of these records, "a beat poet of another sort... one of the few drummers who can creatively straddle and blur the electro-acoustic dividing line."

In 2014, Guiliana paired up with pianist Brad Mehldau — a musician he'd admired from the audience long before they played together — for Mehliana, an electronics-driven duo project. Their one studio album, Taming the Dragon (Nonesuch), pushed Mehldau's playing into synthesizers and Fender Rhodes over Guiliana's programmed-sounding but entirely live drumming; Mehldau picked up a Grammy nomination of his own, for Best Improvised Jazz Solo, on the track "Sleeping Giant." Guiliana and Mehldau toured together again in 2016, this time expanded to a trio with guitarist John Scofield.

That same year, a different phone call changed the trajectory of his career. Guiliana had been the drummer in saxophonist Donny McCaslin's electro-acoustic quartet — alongside keyboardist Jason Lindner and bassist Tim Lefebvre — since 2010, playing on Perpetual Motion (2010) and Casting for Gravity (2012). In spring 2014, David Bowie caught the quartet's regular set at New York's 55 Bar. Ten days later, McCaslin got an email: "This is David Bowie, and he chose me, and he's sending me an email?" Bowie recruited the whole band — McCaslin, Lindner, Lefebvre, Guiliana, later joined by guitarist Ben Monder — to record his next album, working from his own home demos with the drum parts already programmed. Sessions began in January 2015. The result, Blackstar, was released January 8, 2016, Bowie's 69th birthday. He died two days later. Guiliana's playing on the record — much of it built from emulating Bowie's programmed beats on an acoustic kit — was named the Best Recorded Performance of 2016 by Modern Drummer. McCaslin's own Beyond Now (2016), made with the same rhythm section in Blackstar's immediate aftermath, includes two Bowie covers.

Alongside all of this electric and electronic work, Guiliana kept a purely acoustic outlet running too. The Mark Guiliana Jazz Quartet — bassist Chris Morrissey, saxophonist Jason Rigby, and (on its first two records) pianist Shai Maestro — released Family First in 2015, a DownBeat four-star record that JazzTimes described as sounding "like Tony Williams filtered through Dave Grohl." Jersey followed in 2017, with Fabian Almazan taking over on piano, and closing on a cover of David Bowie's "Where Are We Now?" — Guiliana's way, in his own words, of saying "thank you" to Bowie in "an entirely different sonic context from Blackstar." The quartet's later records — The Sound of Listening and Mischief, both drawn from the same March 2022 sessions at Brooklyn's Bunker Studio, with Maestro back on piano — were billed directly to Guiliana rather than to the group name.

Guiliana married singer Gretchen Parlato; their son, Marley, has turned up as a spoken-word vocalist on his father's own records. The family now lives in Madison, New Jersey, not far from where Guiliana grew up — the title of Jersey was a nod to exactly that.

More recently, Guiliana has moved toward solo and stripped-down work. Mark (2024, Edition Records), performed entirely alone across drums, vibraphone, marimba, mellotron, and electronics, earned him a second Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album. questions (volume one) (2025) followed, built around an upright piano and recorded largely with just longtime collaborator Stu Brooks on bass and synths. A follow-up to Beat Music! Beat Music! Beat Music!, titled Beat Music 2.0, is set for release on Edition Records in September 2026 — a return, after the solo detour, to the electric band format that first put Guiliana on the map as a bandleader.

Guiliana's foundational influences run straight down the middle of modern jazz drumming: Tony Williams and Elvin Jones above all, with Max Roach, Art Blakey, Roy Haynes, and Jack DeJohnette close behind. He calls Williams and Jones "the kings" — "this yin and yang that I constantly return to for inspiration." But the other half of his sound comes from electronic music: Squarepusher, Aphex Twin, Photek, and Venetian Snares. "The first time I heard Squarepusher's Feed Me Weird Things, it hit me like the first time I heard Tony Williams with Miles," he has said. "Hearing Aphex Twin was like hearing Elvin Jones with Coltrane." Among contemporary drummers, he names Steve Gadd, Jeff Ballard, Joey Baron, Brian Blade, and Bill Stewart as touchstones, and singles out Jim Black — the first drummer he saw "mash together a wide variety of diverse influences" — as his biggest working inspiration.

That dual inheritance is the whole story of his sound: virtuosic, swinging acoustic drumming pushed up against programmed-sounding electronic precision, deployed depending on the room he's in. Time Out London put it more colorfully: "What happens when you add hard-bop drum masters Elvin Jones and Art Blakey to a 1980s Roland 808 drum machine, divide the result by J Dilla and then multiply to the power of Squarepusher? Answer: Mark Guiliana." The New York Times called him "a drummer around whom a cult of admiration has formed." He moves between that identity and a completely different one without much apparent friction — the hard-swinging, freebop-leaning Jazz Quartet on one side, the beat-driven electronic project on the other, and session work with everyone from Donny McCaslin's jazz-fusion band to St. Vincent and Soundgarden's Matt Cameron on the other. As Guiliana has put it: "The genres I'm performing in may be wildly different — jazz or rock, electronic or acoustic, instrumental or vocal — but the place from where I'm playing is consistent. I want to support the music at all times."