Johannes Boris Borowski studied composition with Hanspeter Kyburz in Berlin and Marco Stroppa in Paris before studying music theory with Jörg Mainka in Berlin. He was awarded the Hanns Eisler Prize for Composition in 2003 and the Stuttgart Composition Prize in 2005. In 2006, he was invited to participate in the Twenty-First Century Young Composers Project in New York. He also participated in the Third International Ensemble and Composers Academy for Contemporary Music in Graz, Austria, with Beat Furrer in 2012.

Borowski has been artist-in-residence at various institutions. In 2007, he served at the Cité internationale des arts de Paris before going to the Schloss Wiepersdorf in 2011, where he received the Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne award for young composers. In 2015, a Baldreit grant allowed him to go to the Brahms House in Baden-Baden. In 2016, he received a residency through the Salzwedelstipendium.

Borowski taught theory, analysis, and ear training at the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler Berlin from 2007 to 2014. Since 2018, he has taught orchestration at the same institution.

The institutions and musicians with whom Borowski has collaborated include Ensemble Modern, the Ensemble intercontemporain, International Contemporary Ensemble, the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, Deutsche Radio Philharmonie Saarbrücken Kaiserslautern, the Lucerne Festival Academy Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Pierre Boulez, Susanna Mälkki, Péter Eötvös, George Benjamin, and Daniel Barenboim.

Borowski is an admirer of Boulez, whom he worked with during his residency in Baden-Baden. Boulez commissioned and conducted Borowski’s orchestral piece change (2007-2008), while Borowski composed Wandlung (2009) in honor of Boulez’s eighty-fifth birthday. In his work, Borowski is particularly interested in the relationship between music and dramaturgy — in his words, “the manner in which music is made to speak.” He explores this relationship in his concertos for piano (2010-2011, 2016) and bassoon (2012-2013). In these pieces, critic Bernd Künzig sees two dramas devoid of action or speech. Borowski echoes the fraught social rapport between autonomy and heteronomy through a reassessment of the relationship between the soloist and the ensemble. He illustrates otherness both in his orchestration and in the type of listening experience he gives the audience. The sidestep he takes in structuring the piece purposefully destabilizes the listeners, pushing them to try to make sense of the piece and to question the writing process by trying to get into the mind of the composer. Borowski pursues this confrontation of individual experiences to enrich a sense of collective experience.

In 2021, he created his first stage piece Stories.Ikarus.

His works are published by Boosey & Hawkes.