Peter Alexander Donald was born May 15, 1945, in San Francisco. In his late teens he enrolled at the Berklee School of Music in Boston, studying composition and taking drum instruction from Alan Dawson. Boston's club scene did the rest of the training. While still a student Donald worked local rooms behind the Al Cohn-Zoot Sims group, Phil Woods, Clark Terry, Joe Henderson, Sam Rivers, Charlie Mariano, Paul Bley, and a young guitarist named John Abercrombie, a connection that would shape the next fifteen years of his career.

Donald moved to Los Angeles in 1971 and built the kind of dual practice the city rewarded: jazz nights and studio days. He became known first as an accompanist for singers, touring with Carmen McRae, and his session log from the period runs from Becky Hobbs's From the Heartland (1976) through Peter Allen's It Is Time for Peter Allen (1977) to later pop work with Helen Reddy, Olivia Newton-John, and Toni Braxton. He also worked steadily in film and television music as a player, contractor, and producer, and served as executive producer of the Los Angeles commercial and film music house Dick Halligan & Associates.

The job that made his name was the drum chair in the Toshiko Akiyoshi/Lew Tabackin Big Band, which he held across essentially the band's entire RCA and Insights run. He is on Kogun, cut at Sage & Sound in Los Angeles on April 3 and 4, 1974, and then on Long Yellow Road (1975), Tales of a Courtesan (Oirantan) (recorded December 1975), Insights (recorded June 22 to 24, 1976), the double live album Road Time (recorded in Osaka and Tokyo in January and February 1976), Live at Newport '77 and its companion Live at Newport II (both drawn from the June 29, 1977 festival set), March of the Tadpoles (recorded January 10 and 11, 1977), Salted Gingko Nuts (recorded November 1978), and Sumi-E (recorded February 2 and 3, 1979 at the Iruma City Auditorium in Saitama). That run of records collected Grammy nominations, a Down Beat critics' Jazz Album of the Year, and Swing Journal Gold and Silver Disks, and it put Donald in front of Japanese and American festival audiences with a band whose book asked for both section swing and the rhythmic footwork of Noh theater percussion. Akiyoshi's teenage daughter Monday Michiru, then billed as Michiru Mariano, sings on Insights; Jimmy Knepper is in the trombone section on Road Time. The orchestra also spun off smaller records Donald played on: Tabackin's quartet album Day Dream (1976), where he splits the drum chair with Motohiko Hino, Tabackin's Meets the Tadpoles (1979), Akiyoshi's trio dates Dedications (II) (1977) and Toshiko Plays Billy Strayhorn (1978), on which he alternates with Jimmie Smith and Jeff Hamilton, and Stepping Out (1977), a septet album Akiyoshi produced for Japan's Discomate label and billed jointly to seven of her sidemen, Donald among them.

Running in parallel was the cooperative band he co-founded with John Abercrombie. The John Abercrombie Quartet, with Richie Beirach on piano and George Mraz on bass, made three albums for ECM under Manfred Eicher: Arcade, recorded at Talent Studio in Oslo in December 1978; the self-titled Abercrombie Quartet, recorded in the same room in November 1979; and M, cut at Tonstudio Bauer in Ludwigsburg in November 1980. The quartet toured the United States, Europe, and Japan and played Newport-New York, Monterey, the North Sea Jazz Festival, and Antibes. ECM gathered all three LPs into the remastered three-disc box The First Quartet in 2015. Donald and Mraz also made a trio record with Abercrombie away from ECM, cut at Sage and Sound in Los Angeles on March 19 and 20, 1979 with Tabackin producing and issued in Japan as Direct Flight and in the United States as Straight Flight, and the two of them backed Abercrombie and John Scofield on the twin-guitar album Solar.

When Akiyoshi and Tabackin moved the band's base to New York, Donald stayed in Los Angeles and kept working the city's jazz rooms. He recorded Warne Marsh Meets Gary Foster in Hollywood on October 12 and 14, 1982, again with Akiyoshi producing, and appeared on Bill Perkins's quartet album Journey to the East (recorded November 19 to 21, 1984, Contemporary), Barry Zweig's Desert Vision (1978) with Bobby Shew, Ray Pizzi's Pablo date Conception (recorded September 1976), and Gordon Brisker's Cornerstone (1984) alongside Tom Harrell. He became Denny Zeitlin's regular drummer for a stretch, first on Tidal Wave (1984) with Charlie Haden and Abercrombie, then on the Windham Hill Jazz trio albums Trio (1988) and In the Moment (1989). In 1985, after the death of Nick Ceroli, Donald took the drum chair in Bob Florence's Limited Edition, staying through Trash Can City (recorded November 1986), State of the Art (1988), and Treasure Chest (1990). The same year he joined Florence he became director of the percussion program at the Dick Grove School of Music, a post he held until 1992.

Donald's working life since has moved between music and the business around it. From 1992 to 2002 he was a partner and music supervisor at the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather, then formed 2beat productions, a music consulting and production company that grew into Jazz Planet, a licensing operation placing jazz recordings in film, broadcast, video games, and theater. He kept playing: he co-led the trio 3prime with pianist Tom Ranier and bassist Abraham Laboriel Sr., whose album was recorded live at Rocco in Bel Air on November 28 and 29, 2000 and released on Peter Erskine's Fuzzy Music label with Erskine producing, and he turned up on George Mraz's trio records Catching Up (recorded in Prague in October 1991) and Plucking and Bowing. In 2010 he took a B.A. in urban community and environmental studies from Antioch University Los Angeles, and in 2012 he was awarded a California single-subject teaching credential in social studies from Cal State Northridge.

Alan Dawson's teaching shows in Donald's playing as a kind of clarity: crisp, unhurried time, hi-hat and ride cymbal carrying the pulse rather than the bass drum, and a preference for shaping a soloist's line instead of competing with it. That made him adaptable in an unusual number of directions. He could deliver the ensemble kicks and shifting meters Toshiko Akiyoshi's charts asked for, then play with brushwork delicacy behind a singer, then move into the loose, rubato-tolerant space of the ECM quartet, where John Abercrombie and Richie Beirach wanted a drummer who would color rather than count. Critics have tended to describe him through the company he kept rather than through a signature lick, and his colleagues have been blunter: Peter Erskine, who produced his 3prime album, has called him one of the finest drummers he has ever heard. Modern Drummer ran a feature interview with him in its June 1984 issue, at the point when his big band, ECM, and Los Angeles studio careers were all running at once.