Biography

Pouya Pour-Amin is an Iranian interdisciplinary artist, composer, theatre maker, and performer based in Oslo, Norway. His practice moves across music, theatre, performance, sound, and digital media, often bringing these disciplines together to explore memory, politics, identity, displacement, and the relationship between individual experience and collective history.

With a background in composition, sound design, theatre, and performance, Pour-Amin has worked extensively both on stage and in the studio. He performed as a theatre actor for many years, appearing in numerous productions in Tehran as well as international performances, while also developing work as a theatre director, composer, and sound designer. His collaborations span theatre, dance, film, visual art, contemporary music, and interdisciplinary performance.

Music remains central to his artistic practice. His work ranges from electroacoustic and experimental composition to music for theatre and film, recording, sound design, and live electronic performance. In recent years, he has increasingly focused on modular synthesis and microtonality, investigating how electronic instruments can engage with the modal structures and tuning systems of Iranian classical music, particularly the Radif.

This research forms the basis of Oslo Chārgāh, an electronic composition project developed during his life in Norway. Drawing on the Chārgāh mode of Iranian music while responding to Norwegian landscapes, mythology, and his experience of displacement, the project creates a meeting point between inherited musical language and contemporary electronic sound. The album Oslo Chārgāh is planned for release in autumn 2026.

His ongoing interdisciplinary work Prison Episodes develops his 2019 album of the same name into a dance-theatre performance combining recorded music, choreography, theatrical monologues, lighting, projection, and real-time motion capture. The work examines the physical and psychological realities of political imprisonment through experiences of waiting, isolation, memory, violence, resistance, and survival. Created with choreographers and performers Anne Goldberg Stavn and Jens Jeffry Trinidad, actor Saba Pouyeshman, and digital artist Øystein Sørum, the production premieres at Bærum Kulturhus during CODA Oslo International Dance Festival in October 2026.

Other recent projects include The Secret Life of a Shameless Demon, a storytelling performance combining theatre and modular electronics, and Dreams in Quarter-Tones, performed at Ringve Music Museum in Trondheim, which explores the meeting between electronic sound and the microtonal language of Iranian music.

Pour-Amin's work has been presented in Norway and internationally through concerts, theatre productions, exhibitions, festivals, recordings, and collaborative projects. Since establishing his practice in Norway, he has continued to develop new works across artistic disciplines while building collaborations with musicians, choreographers, performers, visual artists, cultural institutions, and independent art organisations.

Across these different forms, his work is driven by experimentation, collaboration, and political awareness, treating sound and performance not simply as separate disciplines but as interconnected ways of constructing narrative, memory, and experience.