James Dashow has had commissions, awards and grants from the Bourges International Festival of Experimental Music, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Linz Ars Electronica Festival, the Fromm Foundation, the Biennale di Venezia, the USA National Endowment for the Arts, RAI (Italian National Radio), the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Rockefeller Foundation, Il Cantiere Internazionale d’Arte (Montepulciano, Italy), the Koussevitzky Foundation, Prague Musica Nova, and the Harvard Musical Association of Boston. Most recently, he was awarded the prestigious Prix Magistere at the 30th Festival International de Musique et d’Art Sonore Electroacoustiques in Bourges.

A pioneer in the field of computer music, Dashow was one of the founders of the Centro di Sonologia Computazionale at the University of Padova, and has taught at MIT, Princeton University and the Centro para la Difusion di Musica Contemporanea in Madrid; he lectures extensively in the U.S. and Europe. He served as the first vice-president of the Computer Music Association, and was for many years the producer of the radio program Il Forum Internazionale di Musica Contemporanea for Italian National Radio.

He has written theoretical and analytical articles for Perspectives of New Music, the Computer Music Journal, La Musica, and Interface. He is the author of the MUSIC30 language for digital sound synthesis. His music has been recorded on WERGO (Mainz), Capstone Records (New York), Neuma (Boston), RCA-BMG (Roma), ProViva (Munich), Scarlatti Classica (Roma), CRI (New York), and Pan (Roma).

Dashow makes his home in the Sabine Hills north of Rome.