Born in California, James Reynolds currently lives in Berlin. He studied contemporary music with John Adams, as well as percussion at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and composition in Cologne under Michael von Biel. Reynolds was Composer in Residence at the Laurenz Haus Foundation Basel (2004) and Visiting Artist at the University of California, Santa Barbara (2009).

After teaching Master classes at the Folkwang Hochschule Essen and playing percussion on and off-Broadway (and as band member of The Units) in the 80s in New York, Reynolds took up his long-term working relationship with the Cologne based broadcasting institution WDR. For over two decades, he has written music for literary productions, thrillers, fairytales, and children’s radio plays for the broadcaster. 

Reynolds’ compositions explore the combination of words, sounds, and images – in film music as well as in his work for theatre.

In the field of film music, Reynolds has set Lutz Gregor’s ARTE-productions Verborgenes Venedig (2012), Das Land der Dogon (2011) and Akte Theo: Ungelöst (2010) to music. Moreover, he has written the scores to several episodes of the ARTE documentary series Auf Expeditionsreise as well as for numerous films of the documentary filmmaker Christel Fomm, of which the most recent one was Der Vietnamkrieg: Gesichter einer Tragödie (2015), awarded with the Gold World Medal at the New York Festivals 2016.

Reynolds’ latest works for the stage include the piece Tucholskys Spiegel (world premiere in July 2017 at Schlosstheater Rheinsberg) as well as the opera Ghost Knight (Geisterritter), based on the novel by the German writer Cornelia Funke. After successful film and theatre adaptions, Ghost Knight is the first book of the internationally known writer to be adapted for an opera. The world premiere took place on December 3, 2017 at the Opera Bonn.