Born on Merseyside of Welsh and German parentage, Janet Owen Thomas was already composing actively when she entered Merchant Taylors' Girls' School, before reading Music at St Hugh's College, Oxford where her tutors included Jane Glover and later Robert Saxton (composition). In 1984 a James Ingham Halstead Scholarship took her to Hamburg to continue her studies with Ligeti: it was also the year she received the commission for Rosaces from the distinguished German organist Johannes Geffert. With her return to the UK, requests for new works and a developing career as a concert organist with recitals throughout Britiain allowed her to follow her passions of composition and performing until towards the end of the 80s, when the demands of her commission schedule increasingly forced playing to take a back seat.

Following the premier of her anthem New and Better Days, commissioned to mark the opening of Liverpool's new Tate Gallery, she spent a year reading for a degree in Music Technoloy at York University before taking advanced composition studies with Anthony Gilbert at the Royal Northern College of music. It was at this time that she developed an interest in fractals, on which she has written a number of articles. In 1992 she wrote her Concerto Grosso Cantus for Bang-on-a-Can (the only British work scheduled for that year's festival), subsequently performed at the Goldberg Ensemble's Contemporary series at the RNCM, at Manchester University, and broadcast by R3, leading to the ongoing series of small-ensemble works which have been extensively performed and broadcast.

Always structurally based, Thomas's work is seldom purely abstract in concept, but often employs highly developed intellectual processes and disciplined form to shape and clarify ideas that find their stimuli in extra-musical inspirational areas. She has been active in many musical genres and shows special affinity and flair for ensemble and solo, particularly vocal, writing - qualities combined in Under the Skin (a BBC commission for premier at the 1999 Huddersfield Festival of Contemporary music), and the strong rhythmic and harmonic sense that permeates the continuing series of Preludes for piano of which a selection was premiered in London earlier this year. More are scheduled for the Summer.

Widely performed in the UK, Janet Owen Thomas is perhaps better-known overseas, and has enjoyed recent performances in the US, Germany, France, Denmark, Spain and Eire. In Britain she been commissioned or performed by the bBC, Park Lane Group, Gemini, Stephen De Pledge, Mary Wiegold, Kevin Bowyer, Allegri Quartet, Lontano, Boccherini String Trio, The Option Band and others. She now lives and works in York, dividing her time among teaching, writing and composition.

Giles Easterbrook, May 2000