Karola Obermueller

Obermueller began her training at the Akademie für Tonkunst in Darmstadt. She studied composition with Volker Blumenthaler of the Meistersinger-Konservatorium and the Hochschule für Musik Nürnberg, Theo Brandmüller of the Hochschule für Musik Saar, and Adriana Hölszky of the Mozarteum Salzburg. In 2010, she completed a doctorate at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she studied with Mario Davidovsky, Bernard Rands, Julian Anderson, Chaya Czernowin, Magnus Lindberg, and Harrison Birtwistle. She has taught at Wellesley College and the Young Composers Program at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Since 2010, Obermueller has been one of the directors of the composition program at the University of New Mexico.

Obermueller's first opera, Dunkelrot ("Dark Red"), was written for the opera in Nürnberg after an original libretto by Gabriele Strassmann. The opera tells the tale of an African woman seeking asylum in Germany who gets lost in the German immigration system. Her second opera, Helges Leben ("Helge's Life"), was an adaptation of the eponymous play by Sibylle Berg, and was written with composer Mark Moebius. In 2009, the opera had its well-received premiere by the Theater Bielefeld, in cooperation with the Deutsche Bank Stiftung [de] and the NRW KULTURsekretariat [de] .

Obermueller frequently collaborates with her husband, American composer, Peter Gilbert. In addition to two operas, they have created an interactive installation piece called An Overlapping of Spaces, which combined a series of hanging surround-sound speaker arrays with unique iPod-based audience-interactivity. The work was featured as a centerpiece of the Perceiving Space in Art Gallery at the Davis Museum and Cultural Center between 2008 and 2010, which had previously chosen it as an Artwork of the Month. Their most recent collaboration, Listening to Mountains, was presented in Germany and Australia.

Karola Obermueller (born 21 March 1977, Darmstadt) is a German composer and teacher.