Nasheet Waits was born June 15, 1971, in New York City and raised at Westbeth, the Greenwich Village artists' housing complex where his parents were original tenants, alongside his brother Shareef. His father was percussionist Freddie Waits, a former Motown session drummer who went on to record and tour with Ella Fitzgerald, Sonny Rollins, McCoy Tyner, Freddie Hubbard, and Andrew Hill, and who co-founded the collective percussion ensemble M'Boom with Max Roach in 1970. His mother, a clothing designer, died when Nasheet was thirteen. Growing up surrounded by Westbeth's community of working artists shaped him early: a family friend, the painter and sculptor Carole Byard, let the young Waits loose on the percussion instruments in her apartment, and he spent childhood hours learning by ear from records, absorbing drummers like Mickey Roker.

Waits enrolled at Morehouse College in Atlanta to study psychology and history, a path that changed abruptly when Freddie Waits died suddenly in 1989, when Nasheet was eighteen and still in college. He returned to New York and committed to music as a career, completing his studies with honors at Long Island University and earning a Bachelor of Arts in Music. At LIU he studied drums under Michael Carvin, one of several mentors — alongside Max Roach and drummer Fred King — who pushed him toward finding his own voice rather than imitating his father's or anyone else's. It was Carvin who helped him into M'Boom itself: Max Roach, in effect Waits's godfather in the music, brought him into the ensemble his father had co-founded, putting him on stage in performances alongside guest percussionists Tony Williams and Ginger Baker. Roach's own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile.

Waits's first steady band chair came in saxophonist Antonio Hart's quintet, where he originated the drum seat, recorded three albums — For Cannonball & Woody (1993), It's All Good (1995), and Here I Stand (1997) — and toured internationally through 1998, later returning for Hart's Ama Tu Sonrisa (2001) and All We Need (2004). Around the turn of the millennium, Waits became a founding member of pianist Jason Moran's Bandwagon alongside bassist Tarus Mateen, joining Moran's 2000 album Facing Left and going on to anchor two-plus decades of the trio's recordings — Black Stars (2001, featuring Sam Rivers and named Best CD of the Year by both JazzTimes and The New York Times), The Bandwagon (2003), Same Mother (2004), Artist in Residence (2006), Ten (2010), Looks of a Lot (2018), and From the Dancehall to the Battlefield (2023) among them. JazzTimes called Moran, Mateen, and Waits "the most exciting rhythm section in jazz." In parallel, Waits spent roughly the 2000s in pianist Fred Hersch's trio — Songs Without Words (2001), Live at the Village Vanguard (2002), +2 (2004), and Night & the Music (2007) — one of several working configurations of Hersch's rhythm section; Hersch's own career, including this period, is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile.

Waits's collaborator list from the 2000s onward reads as a map of the New York creative-jazz scene: pianist Andrew Hill (the Jazzpar Octet's The Day the World Stood Still, 2004, and A Beautiful Day, Revisited, 2002), saxophonist David Murray's Infinity Quartet (Be My Monster Love, 2013), trumpeter Ralph Alessi (This Against That, 2002, through Quiver, 2016), trumpeter Dave Douglas's Brass Ecstasy (Spirit Moves and a 2009 NPR Tiny Desk Concert, Brass Ecstasy at Newport, and GPS Vol. 1: Rare Metals, all 2009–2011) and Douglas's Three Views (2011) — Douglas's own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile — and bassist Christian McBride's piano-less quartet New Jawn, from its 2018 debut through 2023's Prime. He is also a founding member of Tarbaby, the collective trio he co-leads with pianist Orrin Evans and bassist Eric Revis, active since 2009's self-titled debut through The End of Fear (2010), Fanon (2013, with guests Oliver Lake and Marc Ducret), Dance of the Evil Toys (2022), and 2024's You Think This America, the group's first recording without outside guests. He is credited by multiple sources, though without a specific recorded date documented, as having also performed with Jackie McLean, Joshua Redman, Joe Lovano, and Steve Coleman over the course of his touring career.

As a leader, Waits has kept a small, patient catalog centered on his quartet Equality, formed in 2007 around a spring tour of Italy with pianist Jason Moran and bassist Tarus Mateen — his Bandwagon colleagues — completed by alto saxophonist Logan Richardson. The group's debut, Equality (Alive at MPI), was recorded live in May 2008 and released in 2009 on Fresh Sound New Talent. Waits expanded and rebuilt the band for 2016's Between Nothingness and Infinity (Laborie Records), pairing his composing with bassist Mark Helias, pianist Aruán Ortiz, and saxophonist Darius Jones. His most recent leader date, 2024's New York Love Letter (Bitter Sweet) (Giant Step Arts), gathers live recordings made with saxophonist Mark Turner, vibraphonist Steve Nelson, and bassist Rashaan Carter at Hunter College's Ida K. Lang Hall and at the site of Seneca Village in Central Park — a nineteenth-century Black landowning settlement demolished under eminent domain to build the park — giving the record's title a direct, personal charge for a lifelong New Yorker whose own family's Westbeth apartment sits a few miles downtown.

Waits joined the faculty of the New England Conservatory in 2020, teaching alongside his continuing performance career, and maintains an active private-lesson practice built around balancing tradition and modernism rather than favoring either. He remains one of the most in-demand drummers on the contemporary scene: recent sideman work runs from saxophonist Jure Pukl's Melt (2023) and Michael Feinberg's Blues Variant (2023) and Crystalize (2023) to a run of 2025 Giant Step Arts dates with saxophonist Jerome Sabbagh, tenor player Mark Turner's Reflections On: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, and trumpeter Rico Jones's Bloodlines — evidence of a drummer, now well into his fourth decade of recording, whose work rate shows no sign of slowing.

Waits's playing carries a direct lineage from his father's generation of drummers through Max Roach and teacher Michael Carvin, both of whom pushed him to develop his own voice rather than copy theirs. What resulted is a style built on instability and dynamic extremes: Jason Moran has described Waits's sensibility as capable of shifting quickly from "lush soil" to "ice," an unsettling quality that makes him equally at home in the harmonic openness of Bandwagon, the free-jazz intensity of Tarbaby and his duo work with saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, and the composed post-bop of Fred Hersch's trio or his own Equality book. As a bandleader, Waits favors deep cuts over standards, drawing repertoire from underplayed composers like Sam Rivers, Andrew Hill, and Elmo Hope, and he builds his groups around cross-generational chemistry rather than name-brand guest features — a philosophy that runs through Equality's twenty-year evolution and into the deliberately guest-free approach of Tarbaby's most recent record.