Rony Iwryn was born in Montevideo and moved to Israel in 1984, at eighteen, carrying the Latin American percussion tradition he had grown up inside. Hadassah Magazine, profiling the Idan Raichel Project in October 2007, described him then as a percussionist who had come from Uruguay twenty-three years earlier at that age, which places his arrival in 1984 and his birth around 1966. The Uruguayan grounding never became a costume he put on for effect: it is the technical base of everything he plays, and Israeli music schools have hired him for exactly that expertise for more than two decades.

His first documented recording is a jazz record. In July 1993, at Gal Kol Studios in Israel, the pianist Zohar Kahila cut Experimental Latin-Jazz for MCI Records, an album whose title states its programme plainly, and Iwryn (credited on that release under the variant spelling Roni Ivrin) plays congas, bongos, and shaker on "Luka," working alongside the timbales player Oren Freed and the timpanist Yoav Lifshitz in a septet that also included the saxophonist Shmil Berniker and the trumpeter Avraham Felder. Through the late 1990s and 2000s he became one of the busiest percussionists in the Israeli recording industry, appearing on albums by Rita, Gidi Gov, Rami Kleinstein, Yehudit Ravitz, Shlomi Shabat, Alon Oleartchik, Aviv Geffen, Dudu Tassa, and Shlomo Artzi, among many others. Around the beginning of 2006 he joined the Idan Raichel Project, and he is the percussionist on "Ôdjus Fitxadu," the Cape Verdean-language track Raichel cut with Mayra Andrade at the Hôtel Atala in Paris and issued as a single in January 2009. He was also a member of Ensemble PHOENIX, the Israeli early music group, from 2004, playing period drums alongside Latin American percussion.

The record that turned him into a fixture of the Israeli jazz scene was made on December 28 and 29, 2010, at Pluto Studios: the saxophonist Amit Friedman's sextet debut Sunrise, released on the Seattle label Origin Records (82614) in April 2012. Iwryn is a full member of that band, not a guest, sitting in a rhythm section with Amos Hoffman on oud and guitar, Omri Mor on piano, Gilad Abro on bass, and Amir Bresler on drums, with a string quartet added on seven of the twelve tracks. Discogs lists him as a standing member of the Amit Friedman Sextet, and he came back for Friedman's next Origin album, Unconditional Love (82818, released March 19, 2021, recorded at Bardo Recording Studio in Ramat Gan in June 2018), playing percussion on "Alma," "Sunset," and "Stride by Stride" beside Tom Oren on piano and Hoffman on oud.

Alongside that, in 2010 the singer Ravid Kahalani began assembling Yemen Blues, and Iwryn was one of the friends he called. Iwryn plays percussion on the self-titled debut (Lev Group Media, 2011), on which Omer Avital served as bassist, arranger, and music director, and where Iwryn also takes an editing credit; the rest of that band was Itamar Doari on percussion, Itamar Borochov on trumpet, Hadar Noiberg on flute, Avi Lebovich on trombone, Hilla Epstein on cello, and Galia Hai on viola. His standing in the group rose quickly. On the band's concert album, recorded at the Zappa Club in Tel Aviv on October 18, 2012 and issued in 2013 as Live. (reissued digitally in 2018 as Live in Tel Aviv), he is credited as an arranger as well as a percussionist, and one of the nine tracks is a percussion solo. On Insaniya (Inzima Publishing, EAN 7290015532952, 2015), produced by Bill Laswell and cut at Kitcha Studios and Orange Music Sound Studio in West Orange, New Jersey, Iwryn is credited as an arranger on eight of the album's nine tracks, sharing that work with Borochov, Doari, and Shanir Ezra Blumenkranz; Omer Avital's own arranging credit on that record covers a single track, "Yamim Shel Kochavim," which Tom Cohen orchestrated.

He has held the Yemen Blues percussion chair continuously since 2010, through the group's contraction to a quartet of Kahalani, Blumenkranz, Iwryn, and the drummer Dan Mayo, and through Shabazi: A Tribute to the Poet (MDC/Xango, June 23, 2023) and Only Love Remains (2024). In August 2016 the band played the Red Sea Jazz Festival in Eilat in a version featuring the singer Margalit Tzan'ani, with Iwryn and Doari both on percussion, Yankale Segal on bass and oud, and Tomer Bar on piano. In August 2019 Yemen Blues played the Festival du Bout du Monde in Crozon, Brittany, where the photographs used on this page were taken.

Two more jazz records and one billing of his own round out the recent work. In January 2019 the composer Piris Eliyahu released Reflections (Live), a nine-track concert album billed as featuring Rony Iwryn, on which Iwryn is a co-credited artist on every track, including a duo with Eliyahu alone on "Swirling Clouds in Autumn"; the kamancheh player Mark Eliyahu and the bassist Hagai Bilitzky fill out the group. In August 2020 the saxophonist Alon Farber brought him in as a special guest for Hagiga's fourth album, Reflecting on Freedom (Origin 82829), recorded at Bardo Studios in Ramat Gan on August 18 and 19 and released in the autumn of 2021, where Iwryn plays percussion on five of the nine tracks, including the group's reworking of Eddie Harris's "Freedom Jazz Dance." And in 2025 he appeared at the eleventh International Jerusalem Jazz Festival, held in the Israel Museum's art garden under the artistic direction of the trumpeter Avishai Cohen, in a duo billed as DaRo with his son Daniel Iwryn on double bass: his own project, under his own name, on a jazz festival stage.

He has taught for over twenty years across several Israeli institutions, including the Israel Conservatory of Music in Tel Aviv, and currently teaches rhythm analysis and an Afro-Cuban ensemble at the Alsheikh School of Music in Tel Aviv-Yafo.

Iwryn is a Latin American percussionist who became indispensable to a Middle Eastern jazz scene, and the friction between those two facts is the whole story of his sound. His base is the conga battery and the Afro-Cuban vocabulary he brought from Montevideo, which is why he teaches an Afro-Cuban ensemble and a rhythm analysis course rather than a general percussion class, and why the credit on his earliest surviving record reads congas, bongos, and shaker. What he does with that base is the unusual part: on the Amit Friedman and Alon Farber dates he lays Afro-Cuban and Brazilian patterns under Middle Eastern modal writing without either language sounding borrowed, and in Yemen Blues he supplies the floor for Yemenite chant and Bedouin rhythm while a second percussionist, Itamar Doari, handles the frame drums. That doubling explains why Kahalani kept both men for years and why the band eventually built a whole concert track around a percussion solo. He is also a genuine sound experimenter: Israeli festival programmers describe him as known for water drumming and for building music out of natural and unconventional objects, and the DaRo duo with his son is presented as a set of organic materials and electronics moving between abstraction and groove. On the Yemen Blues website he sums up his own approach in a sentence: "Music that comes from freedom is the best form of music you can make." His arranging credits on two Yemen Blues records place him in a smaller category still, since the band's arrangements are collective work signed by four musicians and he is one of the four.