Arshia Samsaminia

Arshia Samsaminia (b. 1989, Tehran) is an Iranian composer of orchestral, chamber, solo, choral, electroacoustic and audiovisual works. He studied at the Tbilisi State Conservatoire, the Sibelius Academy, the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, the Gothenburg Academy of Music and Drama and the Berlin University of the Arts, where he studied microtonal composition with Marc Sabat, and is a doctoral candidate in composition at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki under Dimitri Papageorgiou. Among his teachers were Helena Tulve and Malin Bång, and he took part in masterclasses with Georg Friedrich Haas, Rebecca Saunders, Tristan Murail, John Chowning and Klaus Lang.

His music has been played by Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Modern (The Mechanism of Growth, Ticino Musica 2019), Ensemble Musikfabrik, the Stockholm Saxophone Quartet (4our) and many other ensembles, at festivals such as Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Musica Nova Helsinki, Gaudeamus, Mixtur and the Tehran Contemporary Music Festival, in more than fifteen countries. He won first prize at the Remus Georgescu International Composing Competition in Timișoara, received the Fromm Foundation Composer Fellowship in 2025, and has lectured at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm and the Sibelius Academy.

With aNoise: in 2020 he was the jury of our open call and co-curated the competition album Noise à Noise 20.3. In 2022 he was resident composer at the Klangteppich festival in Berlin, and excerpts of his FREQ.EXP from Klangteppich IV appear on Noise à Noise 23: Noise vs. Silence.