Sivan Cohen Elias

Sivan Cohen Elias is a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow. She is an acoustic, electroacoustic and multimedia composer and performer/improviser. 

Her work spans the United States, Europe, Asia, and the United Kingdom, where she has received various prestigious international awards and residencies, including a future residency at the SWR Experimentalstudio, Freiburg, in 2027; the 2024 ACF McKnight Composer Fellow with the American Composers Forum; 2020 Fromm Foundation commission; winner of the 2016 International Staatstheater Darmstadt Music-Theater Composition Competition; 2012 Akademie Schloss Solitude residency; and 2011 Impuls competition. 

Her work is cross-disciplinary, combining physically modified and digitally extended musical instruments, sound objects, body gestures, and video while exploring metaphors of current social themes, touching upon failure, entanglement, and illusion. As noted by The New York Times, Cohen Elias often “deconstructs the instruments themselves” to establish extended sonic environments consisting of multi-layered sonic textures and timbres, composed with puppetry-style performance references.

Her music has been performed by ensembles and performers internationally, including Klangforum Wien, Winnie Huang, Talea, MusikFabrik, Staatstheater Darmstadt, Jack Quartet, Line Upon Line Percussion, among many others. Her music was broadcast with personal interviews on Austrian, Israeli, and German radio stations and appeared on Israeli television. Festival appearances include  Darmstadt, Bludenz, RealTime, Bang on a Can, Wien Modern, Resonant Bodies, and Ultraschall. Her scores are published in the Babelscores online library, with five featured on the ScoreFollower YouTube channel; and her trio album Melting Planets was released under ACF Innova Recordings label in May 2025.

She obtained her B.Ed.Mus and MMus degrees from the Jerusalem Academy of Music, and Tel-Aviv University, respectively, completed post-graduate studies at the School of Music and Performance Arts, Vienna, and earned her Ph.D. from Harvard University. Her main composition advisers during her studies were Chaya Czernowin, Ruben Serioussi, and Steven K. Takasugi.

Since Fall 2022 Cohen Elias has been the Assistant Professor of Composition and Music Technology at the University of Minnesota School of Music. In 2018-2021 she was a Visiting Assistant professor of composition and the director of the Electronic Music Studio at the University of Iowa School of Music. She was also a composition lecturer at Harvard University in 2019 and taught an Electronic Music Performance course at New York University in 2021.

In addition to her extensive classical and contemporary musical education, her background includes practice and training in piano, and vocal performance training, choir conducting; and courses in classical Arabic Maqam system, jazz and blues theory, and history. In addition, she has practiced for many years as a dancer and choreographer, as well as in video editing, drawing, and sculpting, and has collaborated with artists from various disciplines worldwide.