Alex Stein is a native of the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a composer, performer and educator. As a composer with the San Francisco Opera's ARIA Network, Alex helps elementary school classes to create their own operas. He also teaches piano, vocals, guitar, bass, and drums at the Bird School of Music in San Francisco.

Alex holds a Master's Degree in composition from the Mannes College of Music where he studied with David Loeb. While at Mannes, he was a winner of the 2008 Jean Schneider Goberman competition, the Martinu prize for orchestral composition, as well as the Composer-in-Residence Chamber Ensemble commission.

Alex holds a B.A. in music with the highest honors in the major as well as college honors from U.C. Santa Cruz, where he studied composition with David Evan Jones and guitar with Mesut Ozgen. The University of California awarded him the Hortense Zuckerman Prize for outstanding achievement in music scholarship and performance.