Nitzan Birnbaum is an Israeli drummer who started playing at age six and went on to graduate from the Jazz Department of Thelma Yellin High School of Arts, one of Israel's main pipelines into its jazz scene. At 17 he won a scholarship to Berklee College of Music's summer program, "The Workshop," in Boston, and was later offered a full undergraduate scholarship to Berklee itself, which he deferred to complete his IDF service, serving as a designated "outstanding musician" and performing hundreds of times for military and civilian audiences. At 19 he won a "Merit Excellent" scholarship from the America-Israel Cultural Foundation and took first place in the Rimon School of Music's "Jazz Player of the Year" competition. He eventually did take up the Berklee scholarship, enrolling for the fall 2020 semester.

His first major recorded project, the Saba Project, grew out of his relationship with his grandfather, Rabbi Professor Ervin Birnbaum, an educator and Holocaust survivor. Birnbaum spent hundreds of hours interviewing and recording his grandfather's account of fleeing wartime Slovakia and Hungary, sailing to Palestine aboard the Exodus, and building a life and career in Israel, and wrote original music to accompany the excerpted narration. The first volume, self-released through NaNa Disc in March 2020, paired his drumming with pianist Shai Maestro and bassist Chris Tordini, tracked at Bunker Studio in New York. Saba Project, Vol. 2, released that November, split its seven chapters between a second New York date with the same trio and a session at Bardo Studio in Israel with guitarist Dekel Bor and bassist Daniel Ashkenazi.

Alongside his own project, Birnbaum built a working career as a sideman across several Israeli ensembles. He became a regular member of pianist Anat Fort's trio, appearing in live performances and videos alongside bassist David Michaeli, and joined saxophonist and vocalist Abate Berihun's "Addis Ken" project, which sets original compositions and Jewish liturgical material to Ethiopian-Jewish soul music. With Addis Ken he played an international date at Toronto's Ashkenaz Festival, at the Harbourfront Centre, on September 4, 2022, alongside pianist Roy Mor and, again, David Michaeli on bass. Press materials from this period also credit him with collaborations alongside saxophonists Eli Degibri and Daniel Zamir, guitarist Amos Hoffman, and the group Yemen Blues, among others, though no specific recorded credits for these have been confirmed independently of that biographical text.

His time at Berklee produced two more international studio credits, both drawn from the school's network of touring student and alumni bandleaders. In April and May 2023 he recorded on saxophonist and bandleader Charlotte Lang's debut, The Journey, sharing the drum chair on three of its seven tracks (with André Sudol on the other four) at Berklee College of Music's own studios and at the Record Company in Boston; the album came out on the Swiss label Unit Records in October 2024. In May 2024, at the same Boston studio, he recorded the entire drum chair on Italian accordionist Giorgio Albanese's When Time Slipped Away, a session assembling musicians from Italy, the United States, Spain, France, Iran, Lithuania and Japan alongside Birnbaum; it was released on the Italian label Dodicilune in March 2026. An earlier Israeli credit, on pianist Eden Giat's debut Crossing the Red Sea (self-released, April 2021), rounds out his handful of confirmed studio dates before 2026; David Michaeli, his regular bandmate in the Anat Fort trio and Addis Ken, also plays bass on that record.

By 2026 Birnbaum had joined saxophonist Albert Beger's working quartet as its newest member, alongside pianist Milton Michaeli and bassist Asaf Shchori. His first recorded appearance with the group is Astral Visit (Kame'a, 2026), Beger's eighteenth album, a suite of five pieces responding in part to the October 7, 2023 attack and its aftermath. Reviewing the album for the Free Jazz Collective, critic Eyal Hareuveni singled out Birnbaum by name, crediting him and Shchori with "the propulsive drive" behind the opening track, "October 7," and describing the second piece, "C major," as highlighting Beger's rapport with his longtime partners Michaeli and Shchori "as well as the new drummer Birnbaum." As of this writing, Astral Visit has not yet been catalogued on Discogs; its personnel is documented here from that review and from Beger's own quartet billing.

Birnbaum's discography splits between two distinct roles. In the Beger quartet he plays supporting a mature free-jazz working band, praised for propulsion rather than for foregrounded soloing. On his own Saba Project and on the Berklee-network sessions with Charlotte Lang and Giorgio Albanese, he works in a more song-based, harmonically conventional post-bop and world-jazz idiom, alongside internationally established players like Shai Maestro and Chris Tordini. His work with Abate Berihun's Addis Ken project and the Saba Project's own family narrative both point to a drummer drawn to music built around explicit storytelling and cultural memory rather than abstraction. He has also released a Hebrew-language pop album as a singer-songwriter under his own name, a separate strand of his output from his jazz drumming.