Arthur Lavandier was awarded first prize for composition from the École Normale de Musique de Paris and for writing and orchestration from the Conservatoire de Paris.

Initially an orchestrator, he has collaborated with the orchestra Le Balcon regularly since its creation in 2008 and with its musical director, Maxime Pascal. It was with Le Balcon that he first began composing. The orchestra has commissioned and premiered much of his catalogue. Also interested in cinema, Lavandier co-wrote the music for Hélène Giraud and Thomas Szabo’s 2013 feature-length animation Minuscule – La vallée des fourmis perdues (Minuscule – The Valley of Lost Ants). He has been composer-in-residence at the Orchestre de Chambre de Paris since 2017, with whom he created the arrangement of Hector Berlioz’s Mélodies Irlandaises (Irish Melodies) and more recently Le Périple d'Hannon (Hannon’s Journey) for tenor and orchestra, based on the only Carthaginian text to have survived the ransacking of the city.

Lavandier is particularly interested in text and mise en scène and is a fan of German musical theater. A significant part of his catalog is for voice with instruments. He regularly calls upon Federico Flamminio and Frédéric Boyer as librettists, as was the case with firstly Les fureurs héroïques (The Heroic Fury, 2012) and then Poèmes spirites (Spiritual Poems, 2018). These authors have also participated in the five operas already put to music by Lavandier, most in collaboration with Le Balcon. He has written for young audiences with his most recent operas, including La Légende du Roi dragon (The Legend of the Dragon King, 2018), L’Abrégé des Merveilles de Marco Polo (Marco Polo's Compendium of Wonders), which was premiered at the Opéra de Rouen in 2020, and Au cœur de l’océan (At the Heart of the Ocean, 2021). He has also arranged pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach, Claude Debussy, Hector Berlioz, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Gustav Mahler, among others.

In 2012, Lavandier was finalist for the 2012 Queen Elisabeth Competition for composition and winner of the 2014 Prix Swiss Life à 4 mains, in tandem with photographer Julien Taylor for Bobba, the chamber opera they produced together. He was also winner of the 2016 Prix d'encouragement à de jeunes artistes from the Académie des Beaux-Arts and received the 2017 SACD New Talent in Music Prize.

In June 2019, he participated in Le Balcon’s production of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Samstag aus Licht (Saturday from Light, 1981-1983) for ManiFeste, by interpreting taste, one of the six mortal senses from scene 2, Kathinkas Gesang als Lucifers Requiem (Kathinka's Song as Lucifer’s Requiem).

His free adaptation of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique was the first disc recorded by Le Balcon’s label.