"[2] Damion Reid was born June 16, 1979, in West Covina, California, east of Los Angeles, into a musical family.

[3] He has attended the New England Conservatory of Music, where his teachers included Cecil McBee, Danilo Pérez, Fred Buda and George Russell.

Reid was a 1998 recipient of NEC's Alan Dawson Scholarship, and in 1999 was accepted into the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz at the University of Southern California.

He has performed with Greg Osby, Terence Blanchard, Robert Glasper,[4] Cassandra Wilson, Bruce Hornsby, Jacky Terrasson, Ravi Coltrane, Reggie Workman, Marcus Belgrave, Lauryn Hill, Angie Stone, Robert Hurst, Angélique Kidjo, Meshell Ndegeocello, Jason Moran, Steve Lehman, Mark Shim, Dianne Reeves, Mark Turner, Bunky Green, Steve Coleman and the Five Elements, Greg Ward's Phonic Juggernaut,[5] the Steve Lehman Trio,[6][7] various projects led by guitarist Miles Okazaki, Rudresh Mahanthappa and Bunky Green's APEX[8] and the Steve Lehman-Rudresh Mahanthappa co-led project Dual Identity.

Reid's work on the Robert Glasper Trio album Covered earned him a Grammy nomination in 2016.