James has been the recipient of numerous awards, commissions and honors: the 2001 Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, ASCAP, Meet The Composer, the American Music Center, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Chicago Ensemble (Chicago), the Auros Group for New Music (Boston), the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble (San Francisco), Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra's Fresh Ink, the SCI/ASCAP Student Composition Commission, and The Commission Project (Rochester, NY) among others.

Recent performances and commissions include: the premiere of Afterglow, a new concert band work at Kutztown University in November 2009; excerpts of SUCKER, a one-act opera will be presented by Opera on Tap on a workshop at Galapagos Art Space in December 2009; incidental and dance music for the Xoregos Performing Company’s 2009 summer production of Shipwrecked, a play by Adam Kraar; the premiere of short stories, a consortium commission organized by CASE Arts Group, Inc., by saxophonist Jeremy Justeson; and new performances of Snapshot by the Northeastern University (Boston) and Kutztown University (PA) concert bands, adding to the list of hearings by the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra, the Holyoke Civic Symphony (MA), the Tallahassee Symphony Youth Orchestra (FL), the Sacramento Youth Symphony, the Florida All-State Orchestra, the Wyoming All-State Orchestra, and FSU Symphonic Band.

Notable activities from the past few seasons: staged performances of Unfulfilled on Opera on Tap’s New Brew series at Barbes in Brooklyn; the premiere of PANiSONIC by the Iktus Percussion Quartet at SUNY Purchase; songs for the Xoregos Performing Company’s 2008 summer production of Porcelain and Pink by F. Scott Fitzgerald; by the river, premiered by the Heartland Community Flute Choir (Omaha, NE), followed performances at the 2008 National Flute Association National Conference (Kansas City) and by the Stephen F. Austin Flute Choir (TX); Shabby Chic performed by the Society for New Music at the Everson Museum (Syracuse, NY); the New York City premiere of Displace by the Sirius String Quartet; Unfulfilled a song cycle for soprano Rachel Cobb premiered by Forecast Music (NYC); performances of Boondoggle by the Reizen Ensemble and Le Nuove Musiche; Crush for flute and marimba commissioned by the Guenther/Davis Duo premiered at the Florida Flute Fair (Orlando, FL); and Piecing, a multimedia work with visual artist Linnea Paskow, premiered at Galapagos Art Space (Brooklyn);

James is artistic/managing director of the New York City based new music group Forecast Music. He was born in Newport, RI and grew up in the Virginia suburbs of Washington D.C. Before moving to NYC he was an adjunct composition faculty member at the University of Florida and was an assistant instructor at Florida State University. He received a DM in composition from Florida State University, a MM in composition from the University of Texas at Austin, and a BM in composition and classical guitar performance from the University of South Florida. He has studied composition with Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Lewis Spratlan, Ladislav Kubik, Dan Welcher, Donald Grantham, Stephen Montague, Mark Schultz, James Lewis, and Paul Reller.