Petra Ackermann (viola) was born in 1974 in Klagenfurt / Austria. She studied with Siegfried Führlinger at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, and at the Royal Academy of Music in London with John White and Jan Schlapp (baroque viola). She worked on the contemporary viola repertoire with Garth Knox in Paris, which became crucial in her artistic development.

Numerous world premieres were dedicated to her and she has worked with leading composers such as Beat Furrer, Friedrich Cerha, Georg Friedrich Haas, Klaus Lang, Pierluigi Billone, Peter Maxwell Davies, Pierre Boulez and Jonathan Harvey. As a soloist she has performed several times at the Wiener Musikverein and the Wiener Konzerthaus. She is regularly invited to prestigious festivals such as Wien Modern, Musikprotokoll Graz, Klangspuren Schwaz, Carinthian Summer, Salzburger Festspiele.

She is a member of the Mondrian Ensemble, the trio Eis, of the ensemble PHACE contemporary music, the Koehne Quartet and the Ensemble Wiener Collage. She also was invited as a guest musician in Klangforum Wien and ensemble Contrechamps. She is connected in prolific working relationships with musicians from the fields of jazz, electronic music and world music, such as David Liebman, Wayne Horvitz, Elliott Sharp and James Blood Ulmer. In 2009 she was awarded the Prize for Music of Land Kärnten.