Iris ter Schiphorst was born in Hamburg and has lived as a freelance composer in Berlin since 1986. Her compositional work is shaped by her extensive experience as a musician, both in classical music as a pianist and in various rock and pop formations as a bassist, drummer, keyboardist, and sound engineer. Her extensive catalogue of works spans all genres. She studied theatre, cultural studies, and philosophy in Berlin and attended seminars with Dieter Schnebel, Luigi Nono, and Helga de la Motte. At the same time, she intensively explored electronic music and sampling techniques (in 1992, she won first prize in the third Composition Competition for Synthesizer and Computer Music). Together with composers Mayako Kubo, Franz-Martin Olbrisch, Berthold Türke, and musicologists Frank Hilberg and Gian Mario Borio, she founded the association zeit-Musik at the end of the 1980s. The compositions from this period primarily address the relationship between text and sound. In 1990, she founded the electroacoustic ensemble intrors, with which she became a prizewinner of the international composition competition Blaue Brücke in 1997. In 2001, she was nominated for the Prix Italia for her orchestral work Hundert Komma Null. Her works have been premiered at festivals in Donaueschingen, Witten, Helsinki, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Porto, Paris (Festival d’Automne), Munich (musica viva), Forbach (Festival Rendezvous Musique Nouvelle), Berlin (Klangwerkstatt), Cologne (Forum Neuer Musik), at the Expo Hannover 2000, in Glasgow, and at the documenta in Kassel. Since 2013, she has been a member of the Akademie der Künste Berlin, and in 2015, she received the Heidelberger Künstlerinnenpreis. Since 2015, she has been a Professor of Media Composition at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna.
Biography, as of October 2022