Liza Lim

Liza Lim (b. 1966) is a composer, educator and researcher whose music focusses on collaborative and transcultural practices. Beauty, rage & noise, ecological connection and female spiritual lineages are at the heart of recent works such as “Sex Magic” (2020) for flutist Claire Chase; the orchestral cycle “Annunciation Triptych: Sappho, Mary, Fatimah” (2019 – 2022), and “Multispecies Knots of Ethical Time” (2023) for gestural performer, film and ensemble. She is interested in the plural creativities of collaborating with the “more-than-human” and in speculative questions around the sentiency of things including time, notation and of music itself. Her large-scale cycle “Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus” (2018) has found especially wide resonance internationally and highlights ecological listening to more-than-human realms.

Liza Lim has received commissions from some of the world’s pre-eminent orchestras and ensembles including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, BBC, SWR and WDR Symphony Orchestras, Ensemble Musikfabrik, ELISION, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Ensemble Modern, Klangforum Wien, International Contemporary Ensemble, Arditti String Quartet and JACK Quartet. Her music has been featured at the Spoleto Festival, Miller Theatre New York, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Venice Biennale, Lucerne Festival, and at all the major Australian festivals.

Lim is Professor of Composition and holds the Sculthorpe Chair of Australian Music at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. She is the first musician to be awarded an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship (2025 – 2029) to lead a five-year programme designed to encourage engagement with urgent climate and social issues through music.

Recognition for her work includes the Don Banks Award for Music (2018), Paul Lowin Prize for Orchestral Composition (2004), Fromm Foundation Award (2004) and the invite to the DAAD Artist-in-residence Berlin (2007/08). She has been awarded the 2021 Happy New Ears Prize of the Hans and Gertrud Zender Foundation and was a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin in 2021/22.

Her music is published by Casa Ricordi Berlin and on CD labels such as Kairos, Hat Art, WERGO, HCR and Winter & Winter.