Liza Lim was born in Australia in 1966. She studied composition in Melbourne with Richard David Hames and Ricardo Formosa and in Amsterdam with Ton de Leeuw. Upon finishing her studies at the Victorian College of the Arts in 1986, she earned her masters from the University of Melbourne in 1996 and her PhD from the University of Queensland.

Lim is Sculthorpe Chair of Australian Music and Professor of Composition at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Before that, she was a lecturer in composition at the University of Melbourne. She has been a guest lecturer at the University of California, San Diego and the University of California, Berkeley, Cornell University, the Getty Research Institute, at Australia’s major universities, and at IRCAM’s Agora festival. She taught at Darmstadt in 1998. In 2012, she was named to the Akademie der Künste der Welt in Cologne and organized the musical program for the opening of the Cutting Edge Festival there, around the theme of circumcision. From 2008-2017, Lim was a professor of composition and the director of CeReNeM, the Centre for Research in New Music at the University of Huddersfield, UK. She is now Professor of Composition and inaugural Sculthorpe Chair of Australian Music at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music where she leads the ‘Composing Women’ program.

Many of Lim’s myriad commissions have arisen from her collaboration with the Australian ensemble ELISION, for which she has written such pieces as the chamber opera The Oresteia (1991-1993) and the Chinese ritual street opera Moon Spirit Feasting (1997-1999). In 1996, a concert of her work was organized by Radio Bremen, and another by the Ensemble für neue Musik Zürich in 1997. She frequently collaborates with the Ensemble intercontemporain, which commissioned pieces from her in 1992 – Li Shang Yin –, 1999, 2000 – Machine for Contacting the Dead –, 2005; she has also received commissions from the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in 2006, 2008, 2009 – Pearl, Ochre, Hair String – and the Ensemble für neue Musik Zürich. In 2004, the Los Angeles Philharmonic commissioned an orchestral piece, Ecstatic Architecture, which premiered for the opening of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, designed by Frank Gehry. Lim was composer in residence with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in 2005-2006, for which she composed Immer Fliessender, Flying Banner, and The Compass. In 2007, she held a residency in Berlin as a guest of the DAAD fellowship program. In 2021-2022, she was composer-in-residence at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

Her music has been featured in major festivals around the world, including the Maerzmusik Berliner Festspiele in 2008, the Venice Biennale in 2007, the Festival d’Automne in Paris – In the Shadow’s Light (2004), The Quickening (2005), Mother Tongue (2005) – the Salzbourg festival – Songs Found in Dream, which premiered in a performance by Klangforum Wien in 2005 –, the festivals of Lucerne and Donaueschingen –The Guest, for recorder and orchestra (2010). The SWR Symphony Orchestra (Germany) and the Brisbane and Melbourne festivals in Australia co-commissioned her opera The Navigator, which premiered in 2008 and was staged in Moscow and in Paris in 2009. The Cologne Opera and the Musikfabrik ensemble commissioned Tree of Codes, an opera for solo vocalists, ensemble, and electronics, which premiered at the Cologne Staatenhaus in 2016.

Lim’s awards and honors include the Paul Lowin Award, the Fromm Foundation Award, and the Ian Potter Foundation Senior Fellowship for Ochred String (2008), as well as several Australia Council Fellowships. She was a founding member of the Academy of the Arts of the World in Cologne (2012-2016) and in 2022 was elected a member of the Akademie der Künste Berlin.

Her creative approach is shaped by the experience of ecstatic transformation and intercultural exploration. She draws inspiration from ritual music, aesthetics of the Aboriginal cultures of Australia and Asia, and Chinese theater – Moon Spirit Feasting. Traditional culture and modernist abstraction are woven together in her scores. Lim collaborates with traditional musicians: Koto, for koto and ensemble (1993), The Quickening, for soprano and qin (2004-2005), The Compass, for flute, didgeridoo, and orchestra (2005-2006), Sonorous Bodies, for koto and voice (1999),Philtre, for solo hardanger fiddle (1998), How Forests Think, for sheng and ensemble (2015-2016). She also composes for early instruments (The Long Forgetting, for Ganassi tenor recorder (2007)), combining them with traditional instruments in The Navigator.

Lim also composes music for installations, and has worked with visual artists such as Domenico De Clario – Bar-do’i-thos-grol (1994-1995) – Judith Wright – Sonorous Bodies – and Judy Watson – Glasshouse Mountains (2005, Queensland Music Festival).