Chaya Czernowin was born in Israel in 1957. She studied at the Samuel Rubin Academy of Music in Tel Aviv from 1976 to 1982. At the age of 25, she received a DAAD fellowship to study in Germany (1983-1985). From there she traveled to the United States, where she completed her doctorate at the University of California (1987-1993). In 1993 she was invited to complete a residency in Japan on an Asahi Shimbun Fellowship, where she remained until 1995. She returned to Germany for a residency at the Akademie Schloss Solitude (1997) and then continued to Vienna, Austria. During these years she studied with Abel Ehrlich, Yizhak Sadaï, Dieter Schnebel, Eli Yarden, Joan Tower, Brian Ferneyhough, and Roger Reynolds.

She represented Israel at the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers in 1981, received a Stipendiumpreis in 1988, and was awarded the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis of the Summer Courses at Darmstadt in 1992. In 1998, the IRCAM reading panel selected her for a commission to write Winter Songs I: Pending Light (2003). She was also the recipient of fellowships from the experimental studio of the SWR Frieburg in 1998, 2000, and 2001.

Chaya Czernowin’s catalogue covers a wide range of compositions, from chamber music pieces to pieces for large orchestras, such as the monumental triptych Maim for five soloists, large orchestra, and electronics (2001-2007), as well as musical theater and opera pieces, such as Pnima…inwards, which premiered at the Munich Biennale in 2000 and was named best premiere of the year by the journal Opernwelt. Other lyric pieces include Adama, a chamber opera written in combination with Mozart’s Zaïde, which premiered at the Salzburg Festival, where she was a composer-in-residence in 2005-2006, and the chamber opera and you will love me back (2011). Her compositions have been played in major festivals in Japan, South Korea, Australia, and North and South America. She has received numerous awards and honors, including the Siemens Foundation Composers Prize in 2003, a Rockefeller Foundation grant in 2004, a Fromm Foundation Grant in 2009, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011. In 2013, she was artist-in-residence at the Lucern Festival, where her At the fringe of our gaze for ensemble and orchestra and White Wind Waiting for guitar and orchestra were premiered. In 2014, HIDDEN for string quartet and electronics premiered in the IRCAM’s Espace de Projection during the ManiFeste festival. Her third opera, Infinite Now, directed and with libretto by Luk Perceval, premiered in April 2017 at the Vlaamse Opera in Ghent, Belgium.

Chaya Czernowin has been a professor at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) and at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (2006-2009), where she was the first woman ever to teach composition. Since 2009, she has been the Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music at Harvard University. Along with Jean Baptist Joly (the director of Akademie Schloss Solitude) and Steven Takasugi, she helped to create the Summer Academy at Schloss Solitude, a biannual international summer course for young composers. She, Takasugi, and Yaron Deutsch (of the Nikel Ensemble) also founded the Tzlil Meudcan festival and international summer school. She was named to the Akademie der Künste in Berlin in 2017, and to the Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste in Munich in 2021. In 2022, she was awarded the GEMA Deutschen Musikautor prize in the “Composition for Musical Theatre” category.