Ian Pace's international reputation as a pianist, particularly of new music, has taken him to most major festivals: Agora, Aldeburgh, Archipel, Ars Musica, Berlin Bienalle, Cheltenham, and many more through the alphabet. He has given world premieres of well over 100 solo works by composers including Julian Alderson, Richard Barrett, James Dillon, Pascal Dusapin, Brian Ferneyhough, Michael Finnissy, Christopher Fox, Volker Heyn, Gerhard Stäbler, Jay Allen Yim and Walter Zimmermann. He also performs most of the standard piano literature, including 45 concertos, combining a study of performance practice issues and aesthetics with a modernist perspective to produce radical and searching interpretations. In 1996 his London concert series of the complete piano music of Michael Finnissy was described in Classical Music Magazine as "one of the great piano marathons of our time".

Ian was born in Hartlepool, England, in 1968. He studied at Chetham's School of Music, Queen's College Oxford and then as a Fullbright Scholar at the Juilliard School in New York with the Hungarian pianist György Sandor who was a student of Bartók.  As well as his solo career, he is also the artistic director of Topologies and plays regularly with several other ensembles. He is on the piano faculty at London College of Music and was co-editor and a major contributor to the book The Music of Michael Finnissy.