He was born in the city of Kryvyi Rih. At the age of five, he began violin lessons with Inna Valova, and later cello lessons with Elvira Zaitseva.
He graduated from the Odesa Special Stolyarsky Music School, where he studied under Viktor Moldavanov and Pavlo Kupin, and the Odesa National Academy of Music (class of Valerii Kazakov).
In his second year, Mykola entered the private academy Kalaidos hochschule (Switzerland), where he studied under the renowned cellist Julius Berger, a pupil of Antonio Janigro, as well as Mstislav Rostropovich and Zara Nelsova.
In 2014, Mykola won the First Prize at the Ukrainian Cellist Competition in Lviv. In 2017, he gained experience in the orchestra of the Interlaken Classics Festival, performing on the same stage as Mischa Maisky and Alice Sarah Ott.
In 2019, he took part in the Tsinandali International Music Festival, where he had the opportunity to work with conductors such as Gianandrea Noseda, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Lahav Shani, Claudio Vandelli, and soloists such as Mischa Maisky, Denis Kozhukhin, Lahav Shani, and Yuja Wang.
In 2017 and 2021, at the invitation of violinist Andrii Murza, he participated in the Odesa International Violin Competition as a coordinator, where he was involved in the logistics of the contestants, their schedules, and other organizational issues.
As part of the collaboration between Odesa National Academy of Music and Detmold Music Academy (Germany), the musician is taking an audio engineer course and applying his skills to create recordings by young musicians. He also creates video and photo projects at various concert venues in Ukraine.
Currently, Mykola Liubenko is an artist of the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine under the direction of Volodymyr Sirenko. Since 2023, he has been the principal cello of the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine.
Since 2023, he has also been a soloist at the National House of Music.