Ronald Perera was born in Boston, Massachusetts on December 25, 1941. He received both his B.A. and M.A. from Harvard, where he studied composition with Leon Kirchner. From 1963 to 1965 he served as Operations Officer on an ocean mine sweeper, and was honorably discharged with the rank of Lieutenant, USNR. In 1967, while on a John Knowles Paine Traveling Fellowship in Music from Harvard, Perera studied electronic music and computer composition with Gottfried Michael Koenig at the University of Utrecht, Netherlands. He also worked independently with Randall Thompson in choral music and with Mario Davidovsky in electronic music.

Perera's teaching experience includes two years at Syracuse University, where he taught music theory and held a research associateship in electronic music (1968-1970), a year as Acting Director of the Dartmouth College Electronic Music Studio (1970-71) and thirty-one years at Smith College (1971-2002) where he has taught music theory, composition and electronic music, and where he has held the Elsie Irwin Sweeney Chair in Music since 1983.

Ronald Perera's compositions include operas, song cycles, chamber, choral, and orchestral works, and several works for instruments or voices with electronic sounds. He is perhaps best known for his settings of texts by authors as diverse as Dickinson, Joyce, Grass, Sappho, Cummings, Shakespeare, Francis of Assisi, Melville, Ferlinghetti, Updike and Henry Beston. Seven major pieces are represented on recently released compact discs.