Matthew Greenbaum was born in New York City in 1950.  He studied composition with Stefan Wolpe and Mario Davidovsky and holds a Ph.D. from the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund and the New York Foundation of the Arts. His works have been presented/performed/ commissioned by the Darmstadt Summer Festival, the Leningrad Spring Festival, the Jakart Festival (Indonesia),  Hallische Musiktage, the Fromm Foundation, the Meet the Composer/Readers Digest Commissioning Fund, Ensemble SurPlus (Freiburg), Nuova Consonanza (Rome), Ensemble 21 (Odense), the Da Capo Chamber Players, Cygnus, Parnassus, Fred Sherry, Marc-André Hamelin, David Holzman, Stephanie Griffin, the Talea String Quartet, Network for New Music/Penn Council on the Arts, the New York New Music Ensemble, the Group for Contemporary Music, Orchestra 2001, Christopher Taylor and the Riverside Symphony, and the Houston Symphony. Recordings appear on CRI, Centaur and New World. An all-Greenbaum  CD has been released on Centaur Records. A second all-Greenbaum cd, funded by an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, is scheduled for release on the Furious Artisans label.

Greenbaum was artistic director of the Stefan Wolpe Centennial Festival NY (2002-3).  He is a professor of composition at Temple University.