Addison Rider is a Philadelphia-based composer, performer and multimedia artist. Her work builds around the idea of perceptual intimacy, inviting listeners into musical environments that feel observant and inhabitable rather than strictly analytical. She aims to write music that breathes, music that offers sincerity, music that understands. Drawing on her background as a rock musician and songwriter, Rider’s output ranges from acoustic and electroacoustic works, to improvisatory electronic performance, and film and media scoring. Her recent projects engage with subjects of mindfulness, found sound, indexicality, meaning-making, faith, queer identity, religious deconstruction/reconstruction, and PTSD.
Her music has been performed by the Bergamot String Quartet, NuovoSound Ensemble, members of the International Contemporary Ensemble, the Temple University New Music Ensemble, and the Fairmount String Quartet. She has attended festivals and residencies at the 2026 Arts Letters and Numbers Creative Music Intensive, the 2023 New York New Music Intensive and the 2023 Walden School Creative Musicians Retreat. She also served as a full-time chaperone at the 2026 Wildflower Composers Festival in Philadelphia, where she presented a guest lecture on found sound and field recordings.
Recent awards include Best Original Score (for the short film “Benny Boy”) by Farmstead Film Alliance, the Libby Larsen Prize from the 2023 IAWM Search for New Music, a Temple University Smith Scholar’s Award, and a Temple University CARAS grant for her research project “Making Meaning: Perceived Indexicality in Electroacoustic Composition”.
Rider holds an A.A. in Music Performance from the Community College of Philadelphia, where she graduated summa cum laude in 2024, and is currently pursuing her B.M. in Music Composition at Temple University’s Boyer College of Music & Dance.
Addison Rider 