Roger Zahab was born January 5, 1957, in Akron, Ohio. He received a BM in violin performance from the University of Akron in 1978 and an MM in violin performance from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1980. He studied violin with Paul Zukofsky, Hiroko Yajima, Paul Biss, Vincent Frittelli, and Carla Spannbauer, chamber music with John Graham, Samuel Baron, and Charles Rosen, Baroque and classical performance with David Schulenberg, and contemporary practice with Arthur Weisberg. He joined the music faculty at the University of Pittsburgh in 1999, initially as a part-time instructor of violin and viola. Since 2002, he has been a senior lecturer, teaching theory, composition, and orchestration. Since 1993 he has been the director of the University Symphony Orchestra, and he has directed the Music on the Edge Chamber Orchestra since 1997. In 2011 he became the founding core faculty member for the MFA in music composition at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

A prolific composer, his compositions range from music for solo instruments, chamber and vocal music, and opera. His works have been performed throughout North and South America, Europe, and Asia by such soloists and ensembles as cellists David Russell and Lawrence Stomberg, violists David Cerutti and Hannah Levinson, violinists Wyatt True and Nathalie Shaw, flutists Elizabeth Brown, Lindsey Goodman, George Pope, and Rachel Rudich, guitarists James Ferla, James Marron, and John Muratore, pianists Robert Frankenberry, Bennett Lerner, and Eric Moe, percussionists Lisa Pegher, Joshua Quillen, William Sallak, David Skidmore, and Dale Speicher, new music groups California EAR Unit, Flute Force, The Furious Band, IonSound Project, and Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, and orchestras such as the New Amsterdam Symphony Orchestra conducted by Robert Black, and the Akron Symphony Orchestra conducted by Christopher Wilkins. 

As a violinist, Zahab has given more than a hundred first performances and championed music by a wide range of composers from John Cage to Eric Moe, Kwabena Nketia, and Tison Street to Judith Weir and Christian Wolff. Recordings as violinist and composer are available on the Truemedia, Albany, and Koch International Classics labels. His conducting repertoire encompasses the history of ensemble music from Andrea Gabrieli up to the present and includes recent premieres of the operas A Woman in Morocco by Daron Hagen and Barbara Grecki for Kentucky Opera and Mercy Train by Douglas Levine and Julie Tosh.