Nikita Vaganov was born in 1988 in Moscow. He was educated at the Gnessins College in Moscow (Vladimir Ferapontov's class), the Lubeck High School (Reiner Wehle's class), the Madrid Conservatory (Adolfo Garces's class), the Stuttgart Music High School (Norbert Kaiser's class). He took part in the master classes of Sabina Meyer, Eduard Brunner, Vicente Alberola, Sergio Bossi.

He is a laureate of the First All-Russian Clarinetists Competition (2003), the international competitions of the Possehl Company in Lubeck, the Lion's Club in Stuttgart (2012), the Tchaikovsky Competition (2019). In 2011, together with students of the Lubeck High School, he organized the Cascade Wind Sextet that won a prize of an inter-school competition in Düsseldorf (2012),

He worked with the IRO International Youth Orchestra (Ochsenhausen) conducted by Kristjan Järvi, the orchestra of the Russian-German Music Academy, performed at the Beethoven Festival in Bonn and the Music Summer Festival in Oberstdorf. He also played as a guest clarinetist in the Les Dissonances Paris Orchestra, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra.

In 2013-2022, he had been an artist of the Mariinsky Theater Orchestra directed by Valery Gergiev. Since 2022, he is a member of the National Philharmonic Orchestra of Russia and a guest artist of the Utopia Orchestra by Teodor Currentzis with whom he also works in the musicAeterna Orchestra.

He runs master classes in Spain and at the Sirius Educational Center in Sochi. Since 2019, he has taught at Vicente Alberola's MMCV Course in Valencia.