Vitor Goncalves was born in Cataguases, in Minas Gerais, and raised in Rio de Janeiro. His first instrument was the guitar, which he took up at ten with Carlos Eugenio Paz at the Escola de Musica Antonio Adolfo in Leblon. He has said those lessons were where he moved past rock and into Brazilian harmony, and specifically into bossa nova and MPB. He switched to piano after his father bought a keyboard for his sister that she never used, took piano lessons with Cristina Behring, and later added the accordion, the second instrument that now accounts for roughly half his working life. He studied for a bachelor's degree in piano at UNIRIO under the Argentine pianist Estela Caldi, who taught there from 1983 to 2003 and whose Portuguese Wikipedia entry names "the accordionist Vitor Goncalves" among the three students she advised.

The formation that mattered more ran alongside the conservatory. At eighteen, at almost the same moment he entered UNIRIO, Goncalves joined the workshop that bassist Itibere Zwarg ran at Pro-Arte in Rio, the workshop that became the Itibere Orquestra Familia. He stayed nine years. Zwarg had spent decades in Hermeto Pascoal's band, and what he taught in those rehearsals was Pascoal's idea of universal music: harmony, rhythm, improvisation, Brazilian styles, arranging and composition, taught by writing the music in front of the players and asking them to learn it on the spot. Goncalves recorded three albums with the orchestra, Pedra do Espia (2001), Calendario do Som (2005) and Contrastes (2009), and formed a quintet, Bamboo, out of his fellow orchestra members. He has described his colleagues from that room as the equivalent of a university class year, and he still plays with several of them.

He left the Itibere Orquestra Familia in 2008 and joined Maria Bethania's band, where he stayed until 2011. The group recorded two albums and a DVD and toured internationally. Earlier Brazilian work had already put him on stages with Paulo Moura, Ze da Velha, Elza Soares and Emilio Santiago, in the choro, samba, forro and jazz scenes at once, on accordion as often as on piano. The move to New York came out of one engagement: on a 2011 Bethania show in Miami he added two weeks in New York, where the American guitarist Todd Neufeld, whom he had met when Neufeld visited the Itibere rehearsals, put together a gig for the two of them with Thomas Morgan on bass and Joey Baron on drums. Goncalves has called that night the point at which the decision was made. He moved in the summer of 2012 and enrolled in the jazz performance master's program at City College.

New York work came quickly and split into two halves. On the Brazilian side he plays accordion in Regional de NY, a five-piece choro group, and co-leads SanfoNYa Brasileira, an accordion trio with Eduardo Belo on bass and Vanderlei Pereira on drums, whose self-titled 2018 album features Steve Wilson on saxophones across three tracks. He has worked regularly with the singer and guitarist Vinicius Cantuaria and the percussionist Cyro Baptista, and he met Maestro Spok at California Brazil Camp in Cazadero, which led to an invitation to play with the SpokFrevo Orquestra at Lincoln Center and then a commission to compose and arrange a frevo for the orchestra's Frevo Sanfonado project, with Goncalves as the solo accordionist over his own chart. On the jazz side he became a fixture in Anat Cohen's groups, first as a two-track accordion guest on Luminosa (2015), then as the full-time pianist and accordionist of the Anat Cohen Tentet on Happy Song (2017) and Triple Helix (2019), and finally as a co-billed member of Quartetinho, the small group he shares with Cohen, vibraphonist James Shipp and bassist Tal Mashiach on Quartetinho (2022) and Quartetinho: Bloom (2024). He has also been the keyboard voice in Yotam Silberstein's bands: on Future Memories (2019) he shares the piano chair with Glenn Zaleski across five of ten tracks, and on Universos (2022) he plays every keyboard on the record, piano, Fender Rhodes, Wurlitzer, accordion and synth bass.

His own catalog began in January 2017 with Vitor Goncalves Quartet on Sunnyside, cut with Neufeld, Thomas Morgan and drummer Dan Weiss, and reviewed at four and a half stars in DownBeat. Six of its eight pieces are his, and the writing is deliberately hybrid: "Sem Nome" runs mostly in 7/4 with a B section built by rhythmic reduction and a post-tonal introduction he traced to his City College coursework, "Desleixada" is a contrafact of Garoto's waltz "Desvairada" recast in 9/8, and "Winter Landscapes" alternates 11/8 and 12/8 bars under a left-hand ostinato. Two Grammy nominations followed in the same 2020 cycle for records he played on, Triple Helix in Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album and John Finbury and Thalma de Freitas's Sorte! in Best Latin Jazz Album; the Recording Academy lists the Sorte! nomination under his own name. Since then he has recorded Mascarada (Rocinante, 2024), a reading of Ze Keti's songbook with Sergio Krakowski, Todd Neufeld and Jards Macale, the duo EP Cantos de Desassossego with Zelito Medeiros, and Cantilena (2024), a solo accordion program running from Egberto Gismonti and Ernesto Nazareth to Villa-Lobos and Hermeto Pascoal. He teaches piano and accordion at the New York Jazz Workshop and at Choro Camp New England.

Goncalves is a rare double specialist, and the two instruments pull his playing in opposite useful directions. On accordion he is a tradition-bearer, the player New York calls when a record needs real choro, forro or frevo rather than a gesture at them, which is why Anat Cohen, Fleurine and Romero Lubambo all hired him specifically for that horn. On piano he is a composer's pianist working in odd meters and post-tonal harmony, closer to the Thomas Morgan and Dan Weiss end of the New York scene than to any Brazilian idiom. The nine years with Itibere Zwarg are the hinge: what Zwarg carried out of Hermeto Pascoal's band was a refusal to treat genre boundaries as real, and Goncalves has said the whole point of his debut album was to hand Brazilian material to American jazz musicians who admire it without being specialists in it and see what the collision produced. His stated aim is to inject his own musical first language into projects that do not otherwise have it. DownBeat gave that debut four and a half stars, singling out the back-and-forth between Goncalves and Neufeld on "Cortelyou Road."