Tim Collins was born on April 20, 1977 in Plattsburgh, New York, on the western shore of Lake Champlain, and started classical piano and drum lessons at six. He studied classical percussion at Ithaca College with Gordon Stout, who pointed him toward the marimba; in his second year there he began listening seriously to jazz and bought a vibraphone, which became his instrument. He finished his studies at the Manhattan School of Music with Joe Locke, and also counts Stout, Steve Brown and John Riley among his teachers. At the school he played alongside Miguel Zenón, Steve Kirby, Aaron Parks and John Benitez, and sat in the Manhattan School of Music Jazz Orchestra under Justin DiCioccio, the band that recorded Gil Evans's Sketches of Spain arrangements live with Dave Liebman as soloist.

His first recorded document as a leader is the graduation recital itself. Live In Concert, credited to The Tim Collins Quartet, was taped at the Manhattan School of Music on March 24, 2002 and issued the following year with Ayako Shirasaki on piano, Miles Brown on bass and Obed Calvaire on drums, six pieces, all of them his. A year earlier he had turned up on record not on vibes but behind the drum kit, on trumpeter Rich Willey's quintet date Gone With The Piggies (Consolidated Artists Productions, 2001), again with Shirasaki at the piano. He worked the small New York rooms through the next few years: a trio with the bassist Orlando LeFleming and the drummer Chris Higginbottom at the Greenwich Village Bistro in January 2004, an east-coast tour in February 2005 that ended at Blues Alley in Washington with Matt Blostein, Matthias Bublath, Eric Harper and Simon Lott, and a sextet with Joel Frahm on tenor at Fat Cat that December. The Washington Post called him "a musician of fire." New York sideman work ran alongside it: Sam Barsh's I Forgot What You Taught Me on Razdaz Recordz, Martin Urbach's Free Will, and Thomas Barber's Janus Bloc album Snow Road (D Clef Records, 2009), a large-ensemble date with Claudio Roditi and Michael Dease in the brass, Sharel Cassity and Stacy Dillard on reeds, Linda Oh on bass and Nasheet Waits on drums, on which Collins takes one of the record's eight solos.

Valcour, his first studio album under his own name, was announced for Fresh Sound and came out on Arabesque Jazz in 2007, titled for the Lake Champlain island a few miles from where he grew up. It is a sextet: Ingrid Jensen on trumpet and flugelhorn, Aaron Parks on piano, Matt Blostein on alto saxophone, Matt Clohesy on bass and Simon Lott on drums, with eight Collins originals and a reading of The Police's "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic." Fade followed on Ropeadope Digital in 2008, produced by the guitarist Charlie Hunter, who also plays electric bass on it; Lott returned on drums, and a string quartet with the violinist Zach Brock appears on two tracks. Collins describes that record as an exploration of the connections between jazz and minimalist, indie-rock and classical writing. Downbeat gave the two albums three and four stars respectively.

After a period in Salzburg, Collins settled in Munich in 2010, and his working life has been based in Germany ever since, though the association started earlier: Matthias Bublath was the pianist and organist on that 2005 American tour, four years before the first of their six records together. He became a fixture of the Munich scene quickly, with two albums for the Australian guitarist Peter O'Mara, the bassist Henning Sieverts's Vibes & Strings (Enja Records, 2016), Carolyn Breuer's Shoot The Piano Player!, Max Merseny's Thank Y'All, and the Andrea Hermenau Quartet's Die Nachtpracht, on which he plays vibraphone and drums. His third leader album, Castles and Hilltops (Nineteen-Eight Records, 2011), was made with the New York rhythm section of Danny Grissett, Matt Clohesy and Tommy Crane and mixes his own writing with the Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne song "Into The Great Wide Open" and Björk's "The Anchor Song." All About Jazz's William Grim called it "an excellent album by one of the finest vibraphonists on the scene today," and it drew hour-long radio features on Vienna's Ö1-Jazztime and Munich's BR-Jazztime alongside reviews in JazzTimes, Jazzwise and Concerto. A digital EP, Crazy Cat, followed with Bublath, the bassist Peter Cudek and Paul Wiltgen on drums.

The European years widened his range of employers considerably. He plays vibraphone across Chihiro Yamanaka's Runnin' Wild (Verve, 2009), her largest small-group date to that point, and again on the Blue Note compilation drawn from it. In 2019 he joined Shauli Einav's band for Animi (Berthold Records / Outside In Music), an album whose sound turns on the pairing of Collins's vibraphone with Fayçal Salhi's oud, alongside Andy Hunter's trombone, Yoni Zelnik on bass and Guilhem Flouzat on drums. From Mare (2020) onward he has been a recurring voice in the Munich world-jazz group Quadro Nuevo, taking a full chair on their double album Happy Deluxe (2024) with vibraphone, drums, shaker and voice. He also belongs to Gigglemug, the Norwegian quartet of guitarist Bjørn Vidar Solli, bassist Daniel Franck and drummer Hermund Nygård, whose Weisenheimer appeared in 2023.

His own recent records move between formats. Uncertainty (2020), self-produced and recorded in a single February day at Kyberg Studio, is a trio with the bassist Masaki Kai and the drummer Shinya Fukumori, mixing seven Collins originals with Herbie Hancock's "Dolphin Dance" and Leonard Bernstein's "Some Other Time." For Good People (GLM Music, 2023), cut in Munich in two days in October 2021, is a Hammond organ trio with Bublath and the drummer Christian Lettner, the writing split evenly between the two leaders. Since then he has worked mostly in duo: How Did We Get Here? with the Quadro Nuevo saxophonist Mulo Francel, issued on vinyl by Jazz on Vinyl, and Songs from the Treehouse (GLM Music, 2025) with the Austrian pianist Martin Gasselsberger, whose nine pieces include Billie Eilish's "everything i wanted" and a tune called "Adirondack River." Alongside the jazz work he issued Tim Collins Alone in 2025, four songs he wrote, sang and played entirely by himself, and away from music he works as a play-by-play broadcaster and producer for EuroBaseballTV.

Collins is a four-mallet player whose foundation is classical percussion rather than a jazz apprenticeship, and the marimba training under Gordon Stout shows in a legato, harmonically dense approach to an instrument more often played for attack. Reviewers have placed him between two poles: All About Jazz heard "the harmonic adventurousness of Gary Burton with a swinging style reminiscent of Milt Jackson and Bobby Hutcherson," and the Castles and Hilltops review that contains that line singles out "Army Brat" as a straight-ahead swinger in the Modern Jazz Quartet mould. Collins names Jackson and Hutcherson himself, and in the same breath names Ben Folds, Carole King and Tom Petty, which is the other constant: an indifference to repertoire boundaries. Across seven leader albums he has taken material from The Police, Petty, Björk and Billie Eilish and set it beside Leonard Bernstein, Herbie Hancock and his own writing, and his recorded settings run from a bebop-schooled sextet to a Hammond organ trio, a date crossing jazz with minimalist and indie-rock writing for string quartet and electric bass, two duos, and one album he plays alone. Downbeat has described his originals as "thoughtful, probing composition" and his playing as "nothing less than exemplary."