Matthew Stevens was born January 8, 1982, in Toronto, Ontario. He started on piano at seven before switching to guitar around age eleven, drawn in first by Jimi Hendrix and then by the two Canadian guitarists whose records he grew up on, Lenny Breau and Ed Bickert. He graduated from Berklee College of Music in 2004, where he studied with Joe Lovano, Pat Metheny, Mick Goodrick, Wayne Krantz, Dave Samuels, and Hal Crook, and then moved to New York, settling in Harlem for roughly the next two decades.

Stevens built his reputation there as one of the most in-demand guitarists in contemporary jazz, appearing on more than seventy albums as a sideman. He became a recurring member of trumpeter Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah's bands across the 2000s and 2010s, and beginning with 2016's Emily's D+Evolution he became a key instrumental voice for Esperanza Spalding, playing guitar on that album's entire prog-funk reinvention of her sound (co-produced by Tony Visconti) and continuing across Exposure (2017), 12 Little Spells (2018, expanded 2019), Songwrights Apothecary Lab (2021), and the Milton Nascimento collaboration Milton + esperanza (2024), taking a producer credit on several of them. He has also worked as a guitarist for producers Quincy Jones, Glen Ballard, and Tony Visconti. Since 2019 he has been a rotating member of Terri Lyne Carrington's electric band Social Science, appearing on the Grammy-nominated double album Waiting Game (2019) and the more recent Trip the Night Fantastic (2026), and he produced Carrington's Waiting Game itself.

As a leader, Stevens debuted with Woodwork (2015, Whirlwind Recordings), a quartet session with pianist Gerald Clayton, bassist Vicente Archer, drummer Eric Doob, and percussionist Paulo Stagnaro, recorded in Brooklyn in 2014. Preverbal followed in 2017 on Ropeadope, a trio record with Archer and Doob built around samplers and synthesizers alongside the guitar, closing with a guest vocal from Esperanza Spalding on "Our Reunion." Also in 2018 he began a long-running co-led partnership with tenor saxophonist Walter Smith III under the name In Common, a trilogy of quintet albums on Whirlwind built around a different rhythm section each time: In Common (2018, with vibraphonist Joel Ross, bassist Harish Raghavan, and drummer Marcus Gilmore), In Common 2 (2020, with pianist Micah Thomas, bassist Linda Oh, and drummer Nate Smith), and In Common III (2022, with pianist Kris Davis, bassist Dave Holland, and Terri Lyne Carrington on drums). In between, Pittsburgh (2021, Whirlwind) documented a set of short, unaccompanied acoustic-guitar pieces he wrote in Pittsburgh in 2020 while recovering from a broken elbow, recorded solo without overdubs at Audible Images Studio.

In 2022, Stevens was one of five fixed core musicians, alongside Carrington, Davis, trumpeter Nicholas Payton, and bassist Linda May Han Oh, on Carrington's New Standards, Vol. 1 (Candid), a recording of pieces drawn from her songbook New Standards: 101 Lead Sheets by Women Composers. Stevens played guitar throughout the album and shared a co-producer credit with Carrington; the record won the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Album at the 65th Annual Grammy Awards in February 2023, his first Grammy. He has since released the collective quartet album Full Cream (2024, Sugah Hoof Records) with saxophonist Greg Ward, drummer Ziv Ravitz, and pianist Leo Genovese, and a fourth self-titled leader album, Matthew Stevens (2026, Candid Records), described by the label as a "midcareer mission statement" and featuring saxophonist Josh Johnson as co-producer. He has also picked up production and Grammy-nomination credits away from his own catalog, including work on the tribute album I Am a Pilgrim: Doc Watson at 100 (2024). Stevens now teaches at Berklee College of Music as an Associate Professor in the Guitar and Ensemble departments, having relocated to the Boston area after roughly two decades in New York.

Critics have described Stevens's playing as dissolving "the demarcation lines between jazz, rock and ambient music" (Mojo), music that is "honest and soulful" (Pitchfork) and that "advances the ideals of modern jazz" (NPR). His writing moves easily between full-band fusion built on samplers and studio production (Preverbal), spare unaccompanied acoustic-guitar miniatures (Pittsburgh), and the tightly composed "one-page" quintet writing of the In Common series with Walter Smith III. That range, along with steady work as a producer for artists including Esperanza Spalding and Terri Lyne Carrington, has made him as valued behind the board as in front of it. DownBeat's Critics Poll placed him in the Rising Star Guitar category's top ten for seven consecutive years (2016-2022) and included him in its "25 for the Future" issue in 2016.