Helmut Oehring was born in East Berlin in 1961. As a self-taught guitarist and composer, between 1992 and 1994 - following consultations with André Asriel, Helmut Zapf and Friedrich Goldmann - he was a master student of Georg Katzer at the Berlin Academy of the Arts, of which he was elected a member in 2005.
In 1994/95, he was a scholarship scholar at the Villa Massimo in Rome and has since received numerous awards, including the Hanns Eisler Prize from Deutschlandsender Kultur, the Orpheus Chamber Opera Prize Italy and the Schneider-Schott Prize. He was awarded the Hindemith Prize (1997) and the Arnold Schönberg Prize (2008) for his entire oeuvre, which today comprises around 400 works of almost all genres.
Oehring's compositions and productions are performed in concert halls and on stages throughout Europe, Asia and North America. He has also been active as a director and conductor of his own works. In September 2011, Helmut Oehring published his autobiography "Mit anderen Augen. Vom Kind gehörloser Eltern zum Komponisten".
He is a juror for the German Music Authors' Prize 2018 in the category Experiment Voice and a member of the Saxon Academy of Arts and the Academy of German Music Authors. In 2015, Helmut Oehring received the 2015 German Music Authors' Prize in the category of music theater, and in 2016 the Brandenburg Art Prize for Composition/Music.
