Arshia Samsaminia was born in Tehran in 1989. He shared his brother’s enthusiasm for rock music, and as a teenager he played the electric guitar and learned the piano before attending the Tehran Music School in 2004. There he received lessons on the long-necked lute setar, which paved the way for him to explore improvisation in Iranian music. He started to notate his improvisations and to develop the material into compositions. He studied contemporary composition at the Sibelius Academy of Music in Finland, the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, the UDK University of Arts in Berlin, the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, and the Tbilisi State Music Conservatory. He has collaborated with ensembles such as Klangforum Wien Ensemble, Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Musikfabrik, or Trio Estatico. He is a current PhD candidate in Music Composition at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, under the supervision of Prof. Dimitri Papageorgiou.

Since 2020, Samsaminia has been a PhD student at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. In his dissertation, supervised by Dimitri Papageorgiou and Caspar Johannes Walter (Basel/CH), he deals with the systematization of Persian tones and tunings according to the Helmholtz-Ellis method.