Livia Teodorescu-Ciocanea was born in Galați, a town in eastern Romania, on 4 February 1959. She studied piano at the Music and Arts College in Galați between 1965 and 1977, where one of her piano teachers was Charlotte Marcovici, who had studied in Vienna in the 1940s. Teodorescu entered the Ciprian Porumbescu Conservatoire (now the National University of Music) in Bucharest in 1977 and graduated in 1981 with a Bachelor’s degree in Composition. Her teachers there included Myriam Marbe for composition, Ștefan Niculescu for form and analysis, and Ioana Minei and Ana Pitiș for piano. In1985 she also attended the piano master classes given in the ‘Bartók Seminar’ in Szombathely, Hungary, by Zoltán Kocsis and Imre Rohmann.



She turned to Ph.D. studies after the 1989 Romanian revolution, when the system changed and allowed more people to enrol in higher-degree work. She was admitted to a Ph.D. candidature in musicology at the National University of Music in Bucharest in 1996, studying with the composer Anatol Vieru and, later, with Octavian Nemescu. In 1998 and 1999 she obtained a Grant for Excellence from the Romanian government, which allowed her to transfer her Ph.D. studies to the University of Huddersfield in the UK for two consecutive years. There she undertook the composition part of her doctorate, studying with Margaret Lucy Wilkins. The result was a doctorate in both musicology and composition. In 1995 she was appointed assistant professor at the National University of Music in Bucharest, teaching form, analysis and orchestration. In 1997 she became a lecturer, and between 2004 and 2015 she worked as an Associate Professor in composition, form and analysis. In 2015 she became Professor of Composition at the same institution, and in 2017 she was appointed as an Adjunct Associate Professor (Research) at the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music, Monash University in Melbourne.



In January 2021 she has been appointed Artistic Director of the Bucharest National Opera

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