Rama Gottfried’s works are conceived as scenographic worlds, constructed from the medias of acoustic and electronic instrumental performance, puppet-, object-, material-theater, live-cinema, relational, and site-specific performance contexts. Brought to life through the collaborative actions of human and nonhuman performers, the works aim to absorb the audience and physical space, subtly expanding our awareness of detail and increasing our sensitivity to the web of relations that connect humans and the other animate and inanimate entities that surround us.

Born in New York in 1977, Rama grew up in Burlington, Vermont, where he began instrumental and electronic music training at an early age, and pursued visual art studies before shifting focus to music composition. After moving to New York City in 2001, he joined Ensemble Pamplemousse, collaborating with the group from 2003-2013 on developing approaches to the merging of sound, installation, and performance arts.

Rama’s works have been featured at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, MaerzMusik, SPOR, Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik, MATA, Klangwerkstatt, Luxembourg Philharmonie “rainy days”, ECLAT, Ultima, and Rümlingen festivals, among others, and he has created sound installations for the Berliner Congress Center, Complice, Mino Washi Paper Museum, Stadtbad-Wedding, and the Pacific Basin Building. His live video-puppetry work Scenes from the Plastisphere (2018) was awarded the 2022 Stuttgart Composition Prize, and was included on a 2021 Radio France list of “most influential pieces of the 21st century.”

In 2012, Rama was awarded the University of California, Berkeley George Ladd Composition Prize, and was selected for the musical-research residency at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) with the Acoustic and Cognitive Spaces team, studying instrumental approaches to spatial audio technologies. In 2017, he was in residence at IRCAM and Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) working on notation and audio/visual performance systems for spatial movement in collaboration with the IRCAM Musical Representations team.

His first composition teachers were Ernest Stires, Justin Dello Joio, and Nils Vigeland, while studying at the University of Vermont, New York University, and the Manhattan School of Music. In 2009 he completed a Meisterschüler at the Universität der Künste Berlin, where he studied composition with Walter Zimmermann, and in 2015 he received his PhD in Music Composition and New Media from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied composition with Franck Bedrossian, and interactive computer music with David Wessel, Edmund Campion and Adrian Freed at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT). After completing his PhD he was hired at CNMAT as a postdoctoral researcher from 2015-2017, developing courses on digital instrument design.

From 2018-2022, Rama worked at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg, Department of Multimedia Composition, and at the Hochschule für Musik Carl Maria von Weber Dresden’s Hybrid Musik Lab 2021-2022, where he helped develop courses in audio/visual media performance practices.

In 2022, Rama was appointed Professor of Contemporary Computer Music Practice at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (ZHdK), where he teaches and develops transdisciplinary artistic research at the Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technologies (ICST).