Nikola Kołodziejczyk was born on July 5, 1986, in Kraków. He studied at the Academy of Music in Katowice, where he later taught, and his teachers included Irena Rolanowska, Andrzej Jagodziński, Emilian Madey, Edward Anthony Partyka and Wojciech Niedziela. By 2022 he was also lecturing at the Chopin University of Music in Warsaw. He works as a pianist, composer, arranger and conductor, and almost everything he has recorded is written for large or unusual ensembles.

His first major project was the Nikola Kołodziejczyk Orchestra, a band of about twenty-five players drawn from three countries that recorded the five-part suite Chord Nation for the For Tune label in November 2014. The album won the 2015 Fryderyk (the Polish phonographic industry's award) for best jazz debut and received three nominations in all. The follow-up, Barok Progresywny (2015, Nowa Brama Pro Musica), was written for a smaller group of fifteen that mixed jazz players with classical and folk musicians, with baroque violins, a baroque cello, a violone and the bowed folk instruments gadulka and sarangi among the instruments. It was recorded live, without overdubs, and took the 2016 Fryderyk for jazz album of the year. At the ceremony in April 2016 he was also among the Polish jazz musicians who prepared a suite in memory of David Bowie.

Alongside the orchestra he works in a trio, Stryjo, with bassist Maciej Szczyciński and drummer Michał Bryndal, which plays melodic music improvised live in full; its album A Vista Social Club appeared in 2015, and the trio has performed in China, Singapore, Korea, Mexico, the United States, Hungary and Turkey. In 2014 he and Michał Tomaszczyk founded the Warsaw-based Konglomerat Big Band, whose debut Albo Inaczej went gold. Commissions followed in quick succession: a multimedia piece, Cryptonym 27, inspired by the painter Zdzisław Beksiński (premiered October 7, 2016); arrangements of Stanisław Moniuszko's songs for the Szczecin Philharmonic (November 2016); a concert of Mieczysław Karłowicz songs with the same orchestra, Konglomerat and the soprano Agata Zubel; a Concerto for piano and sinfonietta dedicated to the pianist Dominik Wania (March 2017); and an hour-long suite, Wolność, for the chamber orchestra Aukso with the trombonist Samuel Blaser and the trumpeter Tomasz Dąbrowski as soloists (summer 2017). He also arranged Radiohead songs for the singer Monika Borzym (2018) and, in 2020, Chopin pieces for Natalia Kukulska's Czułe Struny project. He was nominated for the 2019 Fryderyk for jazz artist of the year.

His largest recent work sets the ballads of Adam Mickiewicz. Commissioned by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute for the Year of Polish Romanticism, the suite uses contemporary texts by Jacek “Budyń” Szymkiewicz, who died on April 12, 2022, before the premiere. It was first played at the Nisville Jazz Festival in Serbia and presented at the Budapest Music Center on November 9, 2022, with the vocalists Natalia Grosiak, Agnieszka Kiepuszewska, Tomasz Organek and Maciej Starnawski. The studio recording, Budyń o smaku Mickiewicza, came out in 2025 for a seventeen-piece group with an unusual rhythm-section mix of handpans, vibraphone and electric guitars. At the 2026 Fryderyk jazz gala on April 12 he won jazz composer of the year, and the album shared the experimental jazz and contemporary improvised music album award with the trio LIS.

In 2023 he brought together and conducted a revival of the Polish Radio Jazz Studio Orchestra, the ensemble Jan Ptaszyn Wróblewski founded in 1968, for a concert on Polish Radio's Channel Two. The project continued as a concert ensemble, and Polish Wikipedia lists him as its leader from 2023 and as artistic director of the Fryderyk jazz gala from 2025. In 2025 he presented a concert suite as part of the Jazz From Poland in Japan program at Expo 2025 in Osaka and gave concerts in Tokyo. He has also written for games: he conducted for Gamedec (2021) and is among the composers credited on the soundtrack of The Blood of Dawnwalker (2026).

Kołodziejczyk writes extended suites rather than tune-and-solo programs, and each one is built around a new combination of sounds: a large jazz orchestra with strings and free improvisation on Chord Nation, baroque and folk instruments on Barok Progresywny, and handpans, vibraphone and electric guitars behind four vocalists on the Mickiewicz suite. The critic Adam Baruch heard Chord Nation as a hybrid of contemporary classical writing, mainstream big band and free improvisation that continues the European orchestral jazz tradition of bandleaders such as Neil Ardley, Michael Gibbs and Mike Westbrook. He thought Barok Progresywny leaned much further toward classical music, closer to serialism and minimalism than to the baroque, with a few jazz solos breaking through. Kołodziejczyk is also a busy arranger and conductor for pop and classical collaborators, and his Fryderyk wins in 2015, 2016 and 2026 span debut, album and composer categories.