SIVAN COHEN ELIAS

Sivan Cohen Elias is a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow, composer, multimedia sound artist, and electroacoustic improviser who often combines digitally extended musical instruments, objects, toys, body gestures, and visual components. As noted by The New York Times, she often “deconstructs the instruments themselves” to establish multi-layered sonic textures, timbres, and puppetry-esque/choreographic performance elements. Her work is built through societal observations, associations, and metaphors, exploring the psychology of humans, nature, and technology, while intertwining prehistoric and futuristic paths through open-ended surreal narratives. Often, musicians turn into characters and are staged as unified media, linked through sound.

Cohen Elias has received various prestigious international awards, commissions, and residencies, including the 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship; 2027 SWR Experimentalstudio Freiburg residency; 2024 ACF McKnight Fellowship; 2020 Fromm Foundation commission; was the winner of the 2016 International Staatstheater Darmstadt Music-Theater Composition Competition; 2012-13 Akademie Schloss Solitude Fellowship; 2011 Impuls competition; 2008, 2012 Darmstädter Ferienkurse Scholarship; among others. Her works have been commissioned and performed internationally, across the United States, Europe, the United Kingdom, the Middle East, and Asia, in festivals such as MaerzMusik, Darmstadt, Bludenz, Time:Spans, Warsaw Autumn, Bang on a Can, Wien Modern, Ultraschall, to name a few, by prestigious ensembles and performers, including Klangforum Wien, Staatstheater Darmstadt Orchestra, Talea Ensemble, Jack Quartet, MusikFabrik, Distractfold, Dal Niente, and many others. Her 2025 album, Melting Planets, was released through the ACF Innova Recordings label, and her scores are published through Babelscores, and several of her pieces are featured on the YouTube channel ScoreFollower. She received a B.Ed.Mus, and an MMus degrees from the Jerusalem Academy of Music, and Tel-Aviv University, respectively; completed 2-year post-graduate studies at the School of Music and Performance Arts, Vienna; and earned her PhD from Harvard University. Her main composition adviser during her studies was Chaya Czernowin, as well as Ami Maayani, Ruben Serioussi, and Steven K. Takasugi. From 2018 to 2021, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor of composition and the interim director of the Electronic Music Studio at the University of Iowa School of Music. She was also a composition lecturer at Harvard University in Fall 2019 and taught at New York University in 2021. Since Fall 2022, she has been the Assistant Professor of Composition and Music Technology at the University of Minnesota.

Sivan enjoys sharing her life with her husband Rey Hulme, their daughter, Meshi, and their two cats Mo and Zulu.