Rodney Sharman is born at Biggar, a small farming community in central Saskatchewan. His father's family were English, his mother was born in Prince Albert, a small city in Northern Saskatchewan. Her family were ethnic Moravians who fled Czarist Russia in 1898.

When he was fifteen, his family moved to Victoria, British Columbia, where he began to study, play and write music seriously. Rodney studied composition with Murray Adaskin, one of Canada's most important musicians, a great inspiration and friend.

Rodney is a graduate of the University of Victoria School of Music (Victoria, B.C.), the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik (Freiburg, Germany) and the State University of New York at Buffalo, from which he received a Ph.D. in May, 1991.

During 1983-84 he was guest composer at the Institute of Sonology (Utrecht, Netherlands).

He has taught at Wilfrid Laurier University, the University of British Columbia School of Music, the School for the Contemporary Arts and Faculty of Graduate Liberal Studies, Simon Fraser University. He was the Vancouver Symphony's Composer-in-Residence from 1997 to 2000 and the VSO's Composer/Music Advisor from 2000 to 2001.

Rodney was President of the Canadian League of Composers (CLC) from 1993-98 and was president of the Canadian Section of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) from 1991-95. He has served on the CLC Council from 1988 to 1999.

His music has been performed in more than thirty countries. He was awarded First Prize in the 1984 CBC Competition for Young Composers, and the 1990 Kranichsteiner Prize in Music, Darmstadt, Germany.

His chamber opera, Elsewhereless, with libretto and direction by Atom Egoyan, was performed in concert in Amsterdam, and staged thirty-five times since its 1998 premiere in Toronto, Ottawa and Vancouver.

He was the Vancouver Symphony's Composer-in-Residence from 1997 to 2000 and its Composer/Music Advisor from 2000 to 2001.

For some ten years now, Rodney lives in Vancouver.