Composer Steven Rush is an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan, where he works with students from music, dance, art, and engineering. He is also the director of the Digital Music Ensemble, and the Music Director of the Dance Department. Recently, he became the Music Director at Canterbury House, Ann Arbor, where his “Jazz Masses” have achieved national acclaim as an experimental liturgical form. Stephen Rush has been widely commissioned, premiered and performed including the Merce Cunningham Studio and Merkin Hall in New York, Gyory Ballett in Hungary; and internationally in Canada (Toronto's Fringe Festival), Sweden, Costa Rica, Germany, Spain, Hungary, Paraguay, Norway and Switzerland. Recent performances of Rush's music (in 1998) have taken place in Berlin and Dresden, Tokyo, Belgium, Austria, the Netherlands and Hungary.

Rush has premiered and recorded his music with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Warsaw National Symphony and members of the New York Philharmonic, and has released recordings on CALA, MMC Records, Centaur O.O.Discs, Equilibrium, Canterbury House and CRC Publications. Subventions for Rush's formidable body of work have come from Meet the Composer, the National Endowment for the Arts, United States Information Agency, Soros Foundation, Michigan Council for the Arts, and American Music Center. Rush has lectured at IRCAM in Paris, at the First International Dance Festival in Hungary, at the National University in Costa Rica and the University of Madras in India, among numerous other institutions.

He was awarded, with his choreographer/collaborator Sandra Torijano-DeYoung the Mentioné Honorifico from the Government of Costa Rica for innovative work in Modern Dance. He is also known as a avante-jazz pianist, performing with his electronic jazz group "Quartex", Roscoe Mitchell, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Swell, Eugene Chadbourne, “Blue” Gene Tyranny, Peter Kowald, and as a co-producer of the radio series, "Uncharted Jazz" on NPR. He has studied Indian (Carnatic Singing) since 1992, and has received grants from the Kellogg Foundation and the University of Michigan to collaborate with Indian Singers, Musicians and Dancers to perform in the United States and India, as well as producing an educational video on Carnatic Singing with vocalist Sharada Kumar.