Elena Langer was born on the 8th of December 1974 in Moscow. She started playing the piano at the age of six and at twelve made her first attempt at composition. After graduating from the Gnessin Music College where she majored in musicology and piano, she entered the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory to study composition with Prof. Yuri Vorontsov.

In 1999 Elena moved to London to complete her MMus degree with Julian Anderson at the Royal College of Music. She also studied at the Centre Acanthes (France) with Sofia Gubaidulina and with Dmitri Smirnov (St. Albans, UK). From September 2001, she has been working towards her Doctorate at the Royal Academy of Music (London) supervised by Simon Bainbridge and Gerard McBurney.

She has written compositions in diverse genres, including orchestral and choral works,
operas, chamber ensembles and solo works, and has received commissions and performances from international ensembles and organisations such as the Almeida Opera Festival (UK), The Britten and Strauss Festival in Aldeburgh (UK), Dartington Summer Festival (UK), Gaudeamus New Music Week (Netherlands), Homecoming Chamber Music Festival (Russia), Moscow Autumn Festival (Russia), Park Lane Group (UK), St. Petersburg's Music Spring (Russia) and the State of the Nation Festival (UK). Some of her works have been commercially recorded on the Black Box Label (UK) and Universal Music Russia, and some broadcast on BBC Radio 3, BBC World Service, Radio Echo of Moscow and Dutch Radio.

In February 2002 Elena was appointed the Jerwood Composer in Association with the Almeida Theatre in London. She was commissioned to compose two chamber operas in collaboration with the poet Glyn Maxwell. These commissions - Ariadne and The Girl of Sand - were staged at the Almeida Opera Festival in 2002 and 2003. Ariadne was also performed at The Britten and Strauss Festival in Aldeburgh, at the Homecoming Festival in Moscow and at the Royal Academy of Music and has received a Priaulx Rainier Prize. In 2004, Elena received commissions from the Chamber Music Series "XX/XXI" of the Bayerische Staatsoper (Munich) and from the Genesis Foundation for The Umbrella, a chamber opera.