Roberto Giaquinto was born in Naples in 1987 and started playing there as a boy alongside an older brother, working through the city's local jazz, rock and blues bands while still in middle school. His first drum teachers were the Neapolitan players Lello Di Fenza and Luciano Nini. He belongs to a specific and well-documented cohort: a 2012 CasertaNews survey of the Neapolitan jazz drum school named Marco Buccelli (born 1981), Elio Coppola (1985), Giaquinto (1987), Ivano Esposito (1987) and Francesco Ciniglio (1989) as the generation that carried the city's drumming tradition to the United States, each of them by way of an international scholarship. Giaquinto's came in 2008, at the Umbria Jazz Clinics, and it pointed toward Berklee.

He moved to Rome, took a degree in jazz arranging at the Licinio Refice Conservatory, and began touring Europe. Rome also produced the partnership that has run longest in his career. In 2008, days after the Israeli pianist Yakir Arbib took first place at the Massimo Urbani International Jazz Award, the two met and formed the free-improvisation duo Radio Intro. Barely acquainted, they went straight into the studio: Giaquinto plays drums on tracks 7 through 11 of Yakir Portrait (Philology W412.2, 2009), Arbib's debut, in a trio with bassist Francesco Ponticelli. From the same Rome period he appears on Faces 2011, the Saint Louis College of Music compilation, backing the singer Laura Lala on three tracks with pianist Sade Farida Mangiaracina.

The Berklee scholarship came through in 2009 and Giaquinto moved to Boston in 2010, taking a degree in jazz performance. Arbib received a Berklee scholarship at the same time and the two relocated together. In Boston, Giaquinto was selected for the Berklee Global Jazz Institute, the small honors program run by Danilo Pérez with a faculty that then included Joe Lovano, John Patitucci, Dave Liebman, Terri Lyne Carrington and George Garzone. Italian sources credit him with the Elvin Jones Zildjian Award during this period. He names the trombonist and composer Hal Crook, another Berklee teacher, as the mentor who pushed him to write and lead his own bands.

Based in New York since the mid-2010s, Giaquinto built a working sideman career across the city's Italian, Israeli and Berklee-alumni circles. He drummed on the Mike Bono Group's From Where You Are (2013), on both of saxophonist Adison Evans's albums, Hero (2016) and Meridian (AdiTone, 2018), and on guitarist Luigi Masciari's The G-Session (Tosky, 2016), a co-billed trio date with Aaron Parks on piano. Later credits include the Scottish saxophonist Fraser A Campbell's Curio II (Great Shapes, 2020), pianist Emanuele Filippi's Musica Fragile (Artesuono, 2020), the Vittorio De Angelis Double Trio's Believe Not Belong (2020), violinist Ludovica Burtone's Sparks (Outside In, 2023), where he guests on the track "Incontri," and Masciari's Somewhere In My Mind (Tosky, 2024). He has played the Blue Note and Birdland in New York, the Kennedy Center, the Detroit, Toronto and Panama jazz festivals, and Nancy Jazz Pulsations in France.

His own catalog begins with Radio Intro's Sketches on the Radio (2016), a wholly improvised piano-and-drums set taped live on the duo's first Canadian tour in January and February 2016. Uneven Surfaces (2020), a three-track quintet EP recorded in spring 2019, was the first release under his own name and he engineered and mixed it himself. In 2021 he joined the collective Xenya alongside Ponticelli, trumpeter Cosimo Boni, altoist Daniele Germani and pianist Alessandro Lanzoni, each of the five contributing to a pool of ten compositions; Giaquinto's "The Good Place" is the third track. The same year he was co-billed with Arbib and bassist Chris Jennings on Three Colors (Disques JMS), recorded at Studio De Meudon. Ground Floor (La Reserve Records, 2024), cut in June 2021 with Seamus Blake on saxophone, Lanzoni on piano and Joe Sanders on bass, is his fullest statement as a writer. Alongside the playing he founded and directs In Motion Beat Fest, an improvisation workshop and concert series he runs in Naples and Lucca with a faculty drawn from New York and Los Angeles, and he taught on the 52nd Jazz Campus in Latina in 2018. He continues to work in New York, including a duo with pianist Grant Richards documented on The Lo-Down Culture Cast in November 2025.

Italian writers reach for the same two words about Giaquinto: colore and fluidità. The 52nd Jazz Campus biography places his phrasing in a line running from Elvin Jones, Max Roach and Roy Haynes through Art Blakey and Tony Williams, and singles out the originality of his drum sound rather than his speed. Reviewing Xenya, Jazz in Family described his playing on "The Good Place" as full of orchestral colour, with polyrhythmic ideas offered as music rather than as display. As a composer he works the seam between Neapolitan and European melody and American jazz and rock: "Venn Diagram" and "Late Night, Uneven Surfaces" hide dense harmonic and formal writing behind long nostalgic tunes, and Ground Floor pushes that further, setting his own pieces next to Thelonious Monk's "We See" and Joe Henderson's "Isotope" and folding in ambient and psychedelic-rock textures. In the Radio Intro duo he plays the opposite way, minimally and reactively; All About Jazz called the pair's interplay almost telepathic and the record remarkable improvisation.