Sherrie Maricle was born September 2, 1963, in Buffalo, New York, and grew up in Endicott, in the state's Southern Tier. She started on clarinet in elementary school and switched to drums after seeing Buddy Rich perform live, a concert that set the direction of the rest of her working life. She graduated from Union-Endicott High School in 1981 and enrolled at SUNY-Binghamton (Binghamton University), where she began playing professionally as an undergraduate and earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1985. She then moved to New York City and attended New York University, completing a Master of Arts in Jazz Performance in 1986 on a doctoral fellowship awarded the following year, and eventually a Doctorate of Philosophy in Jazz Performance/Composition in 2000.

Her early New York career ran through the city's swing and mainstream circuit. She began a recording and performing partnership with vibraphonist Peter Appleyard in 1987 that produced Cookin' On All Burners (1989, Stash Records), billed to the Sherrie Maricle/John Mastroianni Quintet and featuring Appleyard, pianist Roger Kellaway, and bassist Michael Moore, and Live Concert (1993, LRC Ltd., recorded 1991 in Binghamton), a quartet date with Appleyard, pianist Bill Mays, and bassist Lynn Seaton. In the same period she recorded with the bassist Slam Stewart and worked through the 1990s with The New York Pops, Clark Terry, and Al Grey, alongside a teaching position on NYU's percussion faculty that later earned her two "Music Teacher of the Year" honors from the university.

The turning point came in 1992, when Stanley Kay, a drummer and former road manager and relief drummer for Buddy Rich, built an all-female big band around Maricle after hearing her play in 1990; a nationwide audition that year filled out the rest of the lineup. Kay is credited as DIVA's founder and remained its executive producer and creative director for years afterward, but Maricle has led the orchestra from the drum chair, as its musical director, since day one, and press coverage now regularly describes her as its co-founder alongside Kay. The DIVA Jazz Orchestra released its first album, I Believe In You, in 1998 (reissued in 2000 on Arbors Records), and built a recording history that includes Live in Concert (2002), TNT: A Tommy Newsom Tribute (2005, ten Newsom charts recorded with the arranger's own blessing), The Man and His Music (2010, an Arbors date built around the songs of Johnny Mandel, recorded live at Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola with singer Ann Hampton Callaway as a guest), A Swingin' Life (2014), Special Kay (2016, dedicated to Stanley Kay), the ArtistShare-funded 25th Anniversary Project (2017), Diva + The Boys (2019, recorded live in Pittsburgh with male guest soloists), and Swings Broadway (2022). Now in its fourth decade, DIVA is among the longest-running American big bands still working under its original leadership, a run in the company of only a handful of ensembles led by Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Woody Herman.

Maricle also leads Five Play, a quintet drawn from DIVA's ranks, and co-leads a piano trio, recording since 2017 as 3Divas (later 3D Jazz Trio) with pianist Jackie Warren and bassist Amy Shook. Five Play debuted with On the Brink (1999, Arbors Records), whose lineup included bassist Nicki Parrott, already DIVA's full-time bassist for about three years by that point, and the band later self-released Live from the Firehouse Stage (2019); a 2013 U.S. State Department grant sent Five Play on a tour of Vietnam. The 3Divas' self-titled debut, recorded live in 2016 at WVIA Studios in Pittston, Pennsylvania, was followed by further trio albums including 9 to 5 (2022) and a holiday record, Christmas in 3D.

Since 2013, Maricle has also served as music director and drummer for tap dancer and entertainer Maurice Hines's stage show Tappin' Thru Life, work that brought her a 2014 Ovation Award for Best Music Direction, a 2013 Helen Hayes Award nomination, and a 2016 Audelco Award for the production as Best Musical; DIVA also recorded a Tappin' Thru Life studio album, released in 2025 following Hines's death on December 29, 2023. DIVA co-stars in the documentary film The Girls in the Band and was featured at the 2017 NEA Jazz Masters Awards ceremony at the Kennedy Center. Maricle received the Mary Lou Williams-Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009, and continues to run Musical Magic, a hospital-outreach program she created for the Ronald McDonald House in New York, alongside clinician work for Yamaha Drums, Sabian Cymbals, Aquarian Drumheads, and Vic Firth.

Maricle's playing carries the drive and precision of the swing-and-mainstream big-band tradition that drew her to the instrument as a child watching Buddy Rich, and her reputation rests as much on that stylistic fluency as on the achievement of sustaining a single working big band for more than three decades under her own direction. Critic Jack Bowers, reviewing DIVA's 2023 album for All About Jazz, noted that among American big bands only those led by Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Woody Herman have had comparably long runs, a comparison that speaks to the durability of Maricle's leadership as much as to any single stylistic signature. She moves comfortably between formats without changing what she asks of a rhythm section: the fifteen-piece DIVA charts, Five Play's small-group swing, and the piano-trio intimacy of 3Divas all lean on the same clean time and forward momentum from her drum chair.