Tineke Postma was born August 31, 1978, in Heerenveen, in the Dutch province of Friesland, and picked up the saxophone at eleven. She studied at the Conservatory of Amsterdam from 1996 to 2003, graduating cum laude with a master's degree, and used conservatory scholarships to study concurrently at the Manhattan School of Music in New York, earning a further degree there in 2002 under David Liebman, Dick Oatts, and Chris Potter — Potter's own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile. She has taught at the Amsterdam Conservatory since 2005 and now also holds faculty posts at Codarts Conservatory Rotterdam and the Royal Conservatoire The Hague. She lived in New York from 2009 to 2013.

Postma's second album as a leader, For the Rhythm (2005), recorded at Wisseloord Studio with pianist Rob van Bavel and guitarist Edoardo Righini, marked the start of a long musical partnership with drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, credited as a featured guest on the record. A Journey That Matters (2007) expanded her writing into chamber-jazz territory, adding bassoon, French horn, and bass clarinet to the frame. The Traveller followed in 2009 with a top-tier American rhythm section — pianist Geri Allen, bassist Scott Colley, and Carrington again on drums — the beginning of a formative mentorship with Allen that would resurface a decade later. That same year, Postma won the Jazz à Juan Revelations Award at the Antibes Juan-les-Pins Jazz Festival.

The Dawn of Light (2011), her debut for Challenge Records, brought together a working quartet — pianist Marc van Roon, bassist Frans van der Hoeven, drummer Martijn Vink — for what became her most decorated record: a national-category Edison Award, the Dutch equivalent of a Grammy. Its centerpiece is "Leave Me a Place Underground," on which bassist-vocalist Esperanza Spalding sets a Pablo Neruda poem to Postma's music; Spalding's own career is covered in full in her JazzProfiles.com profile. The two had already crossed paths as labelmates in Terri Lyne Carrington's orbit: Postma plays alto and soprano saxophone across Carrington's The Mosaic Project (2010), the all-star, all-women session that won the Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Album in 2011, on which Spalding also appears; Postma returned for the 2015 sequel, The Mosaic Project: Love and Soul, soloing on soprano behind Chaka Khan on "I'm a Fool to Want You."

A second pivotal encounter came in 2012, when Postma met Wayne Shorter — an experience she has called life-changing, and one that, alongside Jack DeJohnette's example of balancing groove and open improvisation, reshaped how she thought about composing. In 2013 she recorded Sonic Halo, a two-alto-saxophone quartet date co-led with Greg Osby, released the following year on Challenge Records. Also in 2013 she was a featured soloist on Dianne Reeves' Beautiful Life, playing soprano saxophone on "Stormy Weather." Across the mid-2010s she developed a parallel European trio partnership with Belgian pianist Nathalie Loriers, recording the live Le Peuple des Silencieux (2014, with bassist Philippe Aerts, dedicated to the memory of Charlie Haden) and We Will Really Meet Again (2016, with bassist Nicolas Thys). In 2015 the Netherlands recognized her with the Boy Edgar Prize, Dutch jazz's highest honor.

Motherhood interrupted her recording career as a leader for six years. She has spoken candidly about how having a son changed her priorities and her playing — moving her away from conservatory-trained, approval-seeking virtuosity and toward music meant to express "the moment" rather than display technique. Freya (2020), her return, is built around female figures drawn from Norse, Frisian, Celtic, and Roman mythology and history, a thread tied directly to her own Frisian upbringing in Holland's northern countryside; "Geri's Print" honors Geri Allen, who died in 2017. The band — trumpeter Ralph Alessi, pianist Kris Davis, bassist Matt Brewer, and drummer Dan Weiss — is a working group Postma has continued to tour with; Brewer's own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile. The same year, the French Académie du Jazz named her European Musician of the Year, and DownBeat's 2019 Critics Poll had already tapped her as a Rising Star on soprano saxophone.

In 2022 Postma joined Swiss drummer Florian Arbenz's long-running Conversation series for Conversation #5: Elemental, alongside Portuguese accordionist João Barradas and bassist Rafael Jerjen. Aria (2023, Edition Records) followed, and on October 7, 2024, it earned Postma a second Edison Award, National Category — a detail worth stating precisely, since several circulating bios (including this profile's earlier draft) misattribute that 2024 award to Voya, an album that was not actually released until November 2025, more than a year later; this correction is confirmed directly against contemporaneous reporting from The Jazz Mann.

On July 11, 2025, Postma took a rare turn inside Wayne Shorter's own legacy directly: North Sea Jazz Festival presented "The Symphonic Music of Wayne Shorter," pairing the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Clark Rundell, with musicians from Shorter's own bands to premiere large-ensemble orchestral works Shorter left unperformed at his death in 2023. Postma shared the stage with pianist Danilo Pérez and bassist John Patitucci — both longtime members of Shorter's Footprints Quartet — along with drummer Terri Lyne Carrington and saxophonist Dayna Stephens; Pérez's own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile. That November, Postma released Voya (Clap Your Hands), featuring vocalist Theo Bleckmann alongside her touring band of guitarist David Dorůžka, bassist Robert Landfermann, and drummer Tristan Renfrow — a record built around themes of voyage and transformation, its title also nodding to Oya, the Yoruba goddess of wind.

Postma's foundation runs through her Manhattan School of Music teachers — David Liebman, Dick Oatts, and Chris Potter — but her mature voice owes as much to mentors she found later: Geri Allen's example as a bandleader and collaborator, Jack DeJohnette's balance of groove and freedom, and above all Wayne Shorter, whose "life-changing" influence after their 2012 meeting pushed her toward composition built on imagination and openness rather than displayed technique. She has described her own shift, after becoming a mother, from conservatory-trained virtuosity toward music meant to express a single moment honestly — a change audible in the difference between the harmonically dense chamber-jazz writing of A Journey That Matters and the more spacious, narrative-driven writing of Freya and Aria. A throughline of myth and heritage runs across her most personal records: Freya's Norse and Frisian goddesses reach back to her own upbringing in Friesland, and Voya extends the same instinct outward through the Yoruba wind deity Oya.