Elliott Sharp is an American composer, producer, author, visual artist, and multi-instrumentalist. For more than four decades, he has been a central figure in New York City’s avant-garde and experimental music scene with a vast catalog of releases spanning orchestral music, opera, blues, jazz, noise, no wave rock, and electronic music. He leads the projects SysOrk, Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics, and Terraplane, and has pioneered the application of fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetic metaphors to musical composition and interaction as well as devising a synesthetic approach to graphic notation.
Sharp is a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow and was also a Fellow at Parsons Center for Transformative Media. In 2015, he received the Berlin Prize in Musical Composition from the American Academy in Berlin. He has composed scores for feature films and documentaries, created sound design for television interstitials on the Sundance Channel, MTV, and Bravo, and presented numerous sound installations in galleries and museums. He is the author of the books IrRational Music and Feedback: Translations From The IrRational as well as the subject of the documentary Doing The Don’t by filmmaker Bert Shapiro. His latest opera, Substance: The Infinite Spinoza, premiered in June 2026 at the festival New Opera Days Ostrava in Czechia.
Sharp's collaborators have included pianist Cecil Taylor, multimedia artists Christian Marclay and Pierre Huyghe, Radio-Sinfonie Frankfurt, pop singer Debbie Harry, Ensemble Modern, qawwali master Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Ensemble Musikfabrik, JACK & Arditti string quartets, cellist Frances Marie Uitti, blues legends Hubert Sumlin and Pops Staples, pipa virtuoso Min-Xiao Feng, jazz musicians James Brandon Lewis, Jack DeJohnette, Oliver Lake, and Sonny Sharrock, as well as Bachir Attar, leader of the Master Musicians of Jajouka.
