Thomas Bensdorp is an Amsterdam-based composer and intermedia artist whose work includes instrumental and electronic music, videos and sound installations. He has composed for contemporary music ensembles, pop bands, laptops, street organs, automated music boxes, museums, theater, dance and film. In recent work he combines composition and sound design with re-edited archive or amateur film footage and text, to create haunting, fragmented stories that explore memory as a narrative process. Personal histories and found materials - sometimes those of strangers, sometimes those of the performers themselves - are rearranged and layered into a mysterious, semi-fictional context for the music. A recurring theme in these works is the influence of recording technology on (collective) remembrance and perception.
Thomas studied composition at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague, music technology at the Utrecht School of the Arts and film and new media at the University of Amsterdam. His composition teachers have included Gilius van Bergeijk, Martijn Padding, Yannis Kyriakides and Cornelis de Bondt. He has also taught video editing and sound to young Haitian filmmakers in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.