Although he came to composition only in midlife, after a successful career as an orchestral violist, Brett Dean has become one of Australia's most widely performed composers. Writing for traditional classical instrumentation, he has issued works in nearly all the major genres.

Dean was born in Brisbane, Australia, on October 23, 1961, and was raised and educated exclusively in that city. He took up the violin at eight, later switching to viola. Dean attended the Queensland Conservatorium in Brisbane, studying with Elizabeth Morgan and John Curro, and he graduated in 1982 with the school's medal for highest-achieving student of the year. He had already won an ABC Symphony Australia Young Performers Award the previous year. Dean moved to Berlin in 1984, winning a place in the Berlin Philharmonic as a violist in 1985, remaining with the ensemble until 1999. In 2000, Dean returned to Australia and, for a time, pursued a career as a freelance musician, not only composing and playing viola but also taking administrative posts with the Sydney and Melbourne Festivals and the Australian National Academy of Music in Melbourne. He continued to play the viola and premiered his own Viola Concerto in London with the BBC Symphony Orchestra; he has also played the work with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Hamburg Philharmonic, and Orchestre National de Lyon, among other ensembles. His works often draw on extramusical inspirations such as environmental issues (in Water Music), information technology, or the history of music. Perhaps his most successful work is Carlo (1997), for strings, sampler, and tape; it is inspired by the music of Italian Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo and has been performed some 50 times. Some of Dean's work incorporates electronics, while other works are for traditional instrumentation, often demanding mastery of great rhythmic complexity from performers. Dean's Gneixendorf Music - A Winter Journey, which includes a muffled piano in part of the work, was commissioned by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra in Minnesota and premiered in February of 2020. The work refers to the small Austrian village where Beethoven lived for several months near the end of his life.

Dean's compositions have been garlanded with a variety of Australian awards, and also the 2009 Grawemeyer Award from the University of Louisville in Kentucky. More than 40 of them have been recorded on such labels as Chandos, ABC Classics, and Canary Classics. ~ James Manheim, Rovi