Composer and violist Kurt Rohde lives in San Francisco. Recipient of the Charles Ives Fellowship and the Hinrichsen Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and commission awards from the Koussevitzky Foundation of the Library of Congress, the Fromm Foundation of Harvard University, Barlow Endowment for Music Composition, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Hanson Institute for American Music. He was a recipient of the Rome Prize Elliot Carter Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome and the Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin. In 2012-13, he was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies.

His projects include a Meet the Composer/Commissioning Music USA Award to compose a new work for Eighth Blackbird, Southwest Chamber Music, Firebird Ensemble, Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, and Sequitur, to be premiered in fall of 2012 and winter of 2013. He will work with with writer Sue Moon and artist Frances McCormack to create a work for narrator, projected images, and small ensemble.

Rohde is a graduate of the Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins University, the Curtis Institute of Music, and SUNY Stony Brook. He studied composition with Donald Erb, Ned Rorem, and Andrew Imbrie, and viola with Karen Tuttle, John Graham, and Caroline Levine. He is former artistic director of the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, co-director of the Empyrean Ensemble, and teaches composition and theory at UC Davis. He has taught composition at UC Santa Barbara, and was composer in residence at the Yellow Barn Music Festival and guest composer at the Wellesley Composers Conference. Rohde plays with the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble and the New Century Chamber Orchestra.