Vijay Iyer was born October 26, 1971, in Albany, New York, and raised in nearby Fairport, the son of Indian immigrants to the United States. He began fifteen years of Western classical violin training at age three but never studied piano formally, teaching himself the instrument by ear as a teenager. He earned a B.S. in mathematics and physics from Yale University in 1992, then moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, completing an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in technology and the arts at the University of California, Berkeley in 1998, with a dissertation examining embodied cognition in African diaspora music. In the Bay Area he worked with drummers Donald Bailey and E.W. Wainwright and, beginning in 1994, with saxophonist and bandleader Steve Coleman and trombonist George E. Lewis; Coleman's M-Base circle, more than any conservatory, shaped his sense of rhythm as a compositional material rather than a backdrop for melody.

Iyer made his recording debut as a leader with Memorophilia (1995, Asian Improv Records) and followed it with Architextures (1998, Asian Improv), an octet session recorded in California with saxophonists Rudresh Mahanthappa and Aaron Stewart and guitarist Liberty Ellman. Mahanthappa, whom Iyer met in the mid-1990s, became his most enduring musical partnership, running from that record through the duo album Raw Materials (2006, Pi Recordings) and dozens of later shared credits. After relocating to New York, Iyer released Panoptic Modes (2001, Red Giant Records), a quartet date with Mahanthappa, bassist Stephan Crump and drummer Derrek Phillips, then In What Language? (2003, Pi Recordings) and Still Life With Commentator (2007, Savoy Jazz), two hybrid jazz/hip-hop/spoken-word works made with the poet and producer Mike Ladd, built respectively around post-9/11 airport profiling and twenty-four-hour cable news. Blood Sutra (2003, Artists House), a quartet with Mahanthappa, Crump and drummer Tyshawn Sorey, and Reimagining and Tragicomic (2005 and 2008, Savoy Jazz and Sunnyside), the latter two recorded with Crump and drummer Marcus Gilmore, filled out a prolific decade. In 2002 Iyer also co-founded Fieldwork, a collectively run trio with drummer Elliot Humberto Kavee and Stewart on saxophone (Steve Lehman later took the chair), whose debut Your Life Flashes (Pi Recordings) previewed the interlocking metric writing that would define his mature work.

Iyer's wider breakthrough came with his working piano trio: Historicity (2009, ACT Music), with Crump on bass and Marcus Gilmore on drums, reworked material by Andrew Hill, M.I.A. and Julius Hemphill inside the trio's own rhythmic language and was named a best album of the year by numerous critics. Its follow-up, Accelerando (2012, ACT), brought Iyer an unprecedented "quintuple crown" in the DownBeat International Critics Poll, winning Jazz Artist of the Year, Jazz Album of the Year, Jazz Group of the Year (with the trio itself), Rising Star Composer and the pianist's own category in the same year; the trio's third and final album, Break Stuff, followed in 2015. Between them, Iyer released the unaccompanied Solo (2010, ACT) and Tirtha (2011, ACT), a trio with guitarist Prasanna and tabla player Nitin Mitta exploring Carnatic rhythmic concepts. He received the Alpert Award in the Arts in 2003, the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award in 2012, a MacArthur Fellowship in 2013, and a United States Artists Fellowship in 2014.

In 2014 Iyer signed to ECM Records, releasing Mutations, built around a title suite for piano, electronics and string quartet, and the same year scored Radhe Radhe: Rites of Holi, a film by Prashant Bhargava built around the Hindu spring festival, recording the soundtrack with the International Contemporary Ensemble; commissioned by Carolina Performing Arts for the centennial of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, the work premiered March 26, 2013 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and had a later run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival in December 2014. That year he also joined Harvard University as the Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts, with a joint appointment in the Department of Music and the Department of African and African American Studies, a post he continues to hold. His ECM catalog, produced throughout by Manfred Eicher, expanded through A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke (2016), the first of two duo albums with trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith; Far From Over (2017), a sextet record with saxophonists Steve Lehman and Mark Shim, cornetist Graham Haynes, Crump and Tyshawn Sorey; and The Transitory Poems (2019), a duo with pianist Craig Taborn.

Iyer's trio reconvened in a new configuration for Uneasy (2021, ECM), with Linda Oh on bass and Sorey on drums, an album Pitchfork ranked among the best of the year; the same personnel recorded Compassion (2024, ECM). Between the two came Love in Exile (2023, Verve Records), an improvised trio session with Pakistani vocalist Arooj Aftab and multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily, and Defiant Life (2025, ECM), Iyer and Smith's second duo album, whose compositions include dedications to the assassinated Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba and the Palestinian writer Refaat Alareer, killed in Gaza in 2023. In 2026 he recorded Fifteen (Nonesuch Records) with Henry Threadgill and Dafnis Prieto, a collective trio the three had been performing as, on and off, for fifteen years, starting with a series of benefit concerts for New York's Jazz Gallery. He continues to teach at Harvard, perform internationally, and write for outlets including the New York Times and DownBeat.

Iyer's playing joins a rhythmic language drawn from Steve Coleman's M-Base circle and from South Indian (Carnatic) rhythmic theory to a harmonic sensibility indebted to Thelonious Monk's angularity and to twentieth-century concert music; his graduate work on embodied cognition gives his writing an unusual theoretical grounding for a working jazz musician, and he has argued in interviews and essays that his music resists a single genre label. Critics have tended to agree: the New York Times described him as "a social conscience, multimedia collaborator, system builder, rhapsodist, historical thinker and multicultural gateway," and Pitchfork, reviewing his ECM-era work, called him "one of the most interesting and vital young pianists in jazz today." His piano trios, first with Crump and Marcus Gilmore and later with Linda Oh and Tyshawn Sorey, are built on a rhythmic elasticity, metric shifts absorbed without any loss of forward motion, that has been widely imitated by younger pianists, and his ECM duo and ensemble writing with Wadada Leo Smith, Craig Taborn and his own sextet extends the same rhythmic thinking into freer, more open-ended structures. He remains an active essayist and, on later records such as Defiant Life, has set music to texts and dedications addressing specific recent political events.