Michel Camilo was born on April 4, 1954, in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, into a family of musicians (AllMusic notes that all nine of his uncles played). His parents gave him an accordion as a small child, but it was his grandparents' piano that held his attention, and at nine he asked for one of his own. They sent him first to the Elementary Music School of the National Conservatory, and a year later bought the piano. He stayed at the National Conservatory for thirteen years, took a degree there, and at sixteen became the youngest member of the Dominican Republic's National Symphony Orchestra. He has said that he first heard jazz at fourteen and a half, when a radio broadcast of Art Tatum playing "Tea for Two" made him want to learn how that was done.

When a Harvard University jazz band visited the Dominican Republic and heard him at a jam session, its leader told him he belonged in the United States. Camilo moved to New York in 1979 and studied at Mannes College and the Juilliard School. His break came in 1983 at the Montreal Jazz Festival: the pianist in Tito Puente's band could not make the date, and Puente, on a recommendation and without having heard him, asked Camilo to sit in. Paquito D'Rivera was in the audience and invited him into his group, and Camilo toured internationally with D'Rivera for several years and recorded with him. He was also part of French Toast, a Latin-leaning New York band with Anthony Jackson on bass and Dave Weckl on drums that became the core of his own group.

In 1985 Camilo made his Carnegie Hall debut with his trio, toured Europe with D'Rivera's quintet, and recorded his first album as a leader, Why Not?, for the Japanese label King. The title tune became a standard after The Manhattan Transfer recorded it with lyrics, and another early composition, "Caribe", entered the repertoire of Dizzy Gillespie. The trio records In Trio (1986, reissued as Suntan) followed, and then his self-titled 1988 album for Portrait, a major-label debut that held the top spot on the jazz albums chart for ten consecutive weeks. On Fire (1989) and On the Other Hand (1990, for Epic) brought horns and percussion around the trio, and drummer Cliff Almond joined the group that would stay with him for many years.

Camilo has also written for the screen. He scored the 1992 Spanish film Amo tu cama rica and won an Emmy Award for his theme music for the Goodwill Games. In 2000 he was one of the featured performers in Fernando Trueba's documentary Calle 54, playing his piece "From Within" with Anthony Jackson and drummer Horacio "El Negro" Hernández. In the 1990s he alternated trio albums with larger forces: Rendezvous (1993, Columbia) paired him again with Jackson and Weckl, and One More Once (1994, Columbia) was a big-band date with Gary Smulyan, Craig Handy, Michael Philip Mossman and Paquito D'Rivera among its saxophone and trumpet players. In 1998 he was co-artistic director of the first Latin-Caribbean Music Festival at the Kennedy Center, where the National Symphony Orchestra under Leonard Slatkin gave the premiere of his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 1, a work the orchestra had commissioned. He recorded it with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Slatkin for Decca in 2001, together with his Suite for Piano, Strings and Harp and the orchestral Caribe, and played it at the BBC Proms.

The 2000s brought his widest recognition. Spain (2000), a duo record with the flamenco guitarist Tomatito, won the Latin Grammy for best Latin jazz album at the first Latin Grammy Awards, in a tie with D'Rivera's Tropicana Nights. For Telarc he made Triangulo (2002), a trio date with Jackson and Hernández that earned a Grammy nomination, and Live at the Blue Note (recorded in March 2003 with bassist Charles Flores and Hernández), which won the 2004 Grammy Award for Best Latin Jazz Album. JazzWeek named him its artist of the year for 2004. Solo (2005) and a recording of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue with the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra followed; the Gershwin album won the 2006 Latin Grammy for best classical album. Spain Again (2006) revisited the Tomatito duo, and Spirit of the Moment (2007), with Flores and drummer Dafnis Prieto, was his last album for Telarc.

In 2009 he began a two-year appointment as the Detroit Symphony Orchestra's jazz creative director chair, and Caribe, a concert album and video with his big band, was released the same year. Mano a Mano (2011) was a trio record with Flores and the percussionist Giovanni Hidalgo, and the solo album What's Up? (2013, OKeh) won a Latin Grammy for best Latin jazz album. He and Tomatito made Spain Forever (2016), which took the 2017 Latin Grammy for best instrumental album. Live in London (2017) documented a solo recital at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, and in April 2017 the Detroit Symphony Orchestra premiered his Concerto for Jazz Trio and Orchestra. Essence (2019) is a full-band Latin jazz album with arrangements by Mossman, and Spain Forever Again (2024), the fourth Tomatito record, was nominated for the 2025 Grammy for Best Latin Jazz Album. His official tour schedule as of November 2026 lists a solo recital in California in October and a run of European concerts in October and November with a trio of drummer Antonio Sanchez and bassist Ricky Rodríguez.

Camilo is a conservatory-trained virtuoso whose command of the keyboard is the first thing critics mention: AllMusic calls him technically brilliant and a pianist who blends Caribbean styles with American jazz, and his own writing mixes Latin rhythm, bebop harmony and classical form in a single idiom. He has named Art Tatum as the pianist who first drew him to jazz, and he has cited Horace Silver, Erroll Garner, Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett and Chick Corea among the jazz pianists he studied, along with the Brazilian trio pianist Amilton Godoy and the ragtime of Scott Joplin. His compositions ("Why Not?", "Caribe", "From Within") are a staple of Latin jazz repertoire, and he moves easily between small-group jazz, flamenco collaboration and concert-hall orchestral writing, a range reflected in his Grammy and Latin Grammy wins in Latin jazz, classical and instrumental categories.