Christian Dierstein completed his music studies in Freiburg, Paris, and Mannheim. He has won numerous competitions and received scholarships from the German Academic Scholarship Foundation and the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart. Since 1988, he has been the percussionist of Ensemble Recherche and since 1994, a member of Trio accanto with Stefan Wirth and Marcus Weiss. During the 2010–11 season, he was one of the “Rising Stars” of the European Concert Hall Organization. His solo performances with various orchestras have taken him all over the world. Numerous radio and CD recordings, both as a soloist and in chamber music ensembles, attest to his skill.

He collaborates closely with numerous composers, including Hans Abrahamsen, Mark Andre, Georges Aperghis, Carola Bauckholt, Pierluigi Billone, Eivind Buene, Beat Furrer, Hugues Dufourt, Helmut Lachenmann, Rebecca Saunders, Elnaz Seyedi, Salvatore Sciarrino, and many others. He is also deeply engaged with non-European music and free improvisation. Since 2001, he has been a professor of percussion and new chamber music at the Basel University of Music. From 2008 to 2022, he was a percussion instructor at the International Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt, and since 2011, he has been an instructor at the Impuls Courses in Graz.