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Jennifer O'Connor is a composer and teacher of piano, theory, musicianship and music at university entrance level.

O'Connor was born in Mudgee, New South Wales. She received her early musical training at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. After moving to Western Australia, she began a Bachelor of Music degree at the University of Western Australia majoring in performance and changed to composition after visiting the USA with her family for 18 months. There she undertook studies in composition with Andrew Imbrie at the University of California ( Berkeley campus). Upon returning to Australia, she completed her composition degree and then worked for ten years as Head of Music at Mercedes College, Perth, before resigning to undertake a Master of Music composition degree by research at the University of Western Australia with Professor Roger Smalley as supervisor. She was awarded the Master of Music degree in September 2004.

O'Connor's music is inspired by poetry and visual art, and she creates sounds and rhythms that can almost be said or sung, but by instruments, to create the atmosphere within the poem or painting. The pictures created by the words create the music. A work most representative of her style is Night Dances, in which she creates an outside environment with quarter tones, glissandi, a sort of bird-call motif – 'the comets have such a space to cross…of your small breath…warm and human, smell of your sleeps, lilies, lilies', an inside environment with repeating notes and a melodic element - and crossing between outside to inside.

Her output includes works for percussion, orchestra, chamber pieces, and works for voice. She has written for professional players, university students, school students and amateurs. O'Connor's early works reflect a fleeting interest in serial composition, a Bartokian influence (second movement of her string quartet Dimensions) and Astor Piazolla's tangos (third movement of her string quartet Dimensions). Today's composers she admires are Liza Lim, particularly her rhythms, and the music of Gordon Kerry and Nigel Westlake.

Her music has been included in festivals such as Tura New Music and Hear Now, at conferences and broadcast by ABC FM radio. The works performed on these occasions include Bunch of Fives for percussion, wind, strings and piano for the Totally Huge New Music festival in Perth in 2001, a movement (Tango) of her String Quartet Dimensions for the Festival of Womens' Music Conference, Canberra 2001, and also for the Totally Huge New Music Festival, 2002. Night Dances for Bb Clarinet and Violoncello was performed at the Totally Huge New Music Festival in 2002, at the Hear Now! New Music Festival at the University of Western Australian 2002, and also broadcast on FM Classic Radio).

Biography provided by the composer — current to March 2006