Discover the nominees for the 22nd World Soundtrack Awards!

Karl Frid's vast knowledge in music ranges from classical and jazz to latin, hip-hop and pop music. His latest work for film is the feature Pleasure, by Ninja Thyberg, which was in the official selection of the Cannes Film Festival 2020 and was in competition at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2021, where it received outstanding reviews with special mentions of the score.

Since 2011 Frid has been working closely with his brother, Pär under the name Frid & Frid. They primarily write music for film and TV and have scored several features and series of different genres. In 2018 they were nominated in the category best music at the Swedish Film Institute’s award ”Guldbaggen” for the score of the documentary Citizen Schein.

Eiko Ishibashi is a Japanese multi-instrumentalist whose work has ranged from acclaimed singer-songwriter albums to scores for film, television, theater and exhibitions to improvised music. She branched out into film composing in 2016, creating the score for the film Albino's Tree directed by Masakazu Kaneko, which won the Best Music Award at the Cinalfama Lisbon International Film Awards.

The score she composed for Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s film Drive My Car (2021) garnered international attention and was later arranged into an album released in the same year, incorporating sound effects from the film.

Son Lux is a geographically and culturally diverse band, with Rafiq Bhatia, Ian Chang, and Ryan Lott each bringing their unique sonic approach to create an otherworldly whole. Son Lux’s balancing of raw emotional intimacy and meticulous electronic constructions, coupled with the act of distilling their varied influences, has most strongly shaped their identity.

Distilling these varied influences, Son Lux searches for equilibrium of raw emotional intimacy and meticulous electronic constructions. Son Lux has most recently scored Everything Everywhere All at Once for A24.

International award-winning composer Maurizio Malagnini burst onto the scene in 2009, bringing to television his cinematic class and stunning melodies through his scores to numerous BBC hits, such as The Paradise, Call The Midwife. In demand because of his ability to vary his palette of sounds and styles, each time bringing the audience to the heart of the story, Malagnini’s work on The Paradise was recognized with an Emmy Award Nomination.

Malagnini has recently finished scoring season 11 of the BBC series Call The Midwife and has scored an animation and live action version of the ballet Coppelia. This score has received 3 nominations from the IFMCA, winning 2 awards including the prestigious "Film Score Of The Year" in 2022.

Isobel Waller-Bridge is an award-winning composer known for her scores for film, television and theatre, alongside her work in electronic and contemporary classical music. She works in a wide range of genres, extending across large-scale orchestral music, electronic sound design, experimental music and song writing. Titles she scored include, among others Munich: The Edge of War, I Came By, Fleabag and Black Mirror.

Waller-Bridge has received a number of awards including Best Composer at Underwire Film Festival and winner of Best Sound Designer at the Off West End Theatre Awards. In February 2022, Isobel featured as Composer Magazine's digital cover story.

Michelino Bisceglia, Belgian composer and jazz pianist, is best known for scoring Marina (2014), for which he won the World Soundtrack Public Choice Award, and orchestrating and conducting the scores for Cafard (2016) and Mother's Instinct (2019). These last two films won a World Soundtrack Award. Bisceglia’s most recent work includes the series Thieves of the Wood, released world-wide by Netflix. Last year, he also composed the orchestral score for the animation drama Charlotte (with Keira Knightley). This film premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2021.

Bisceglia has worked with many international orchestras, such as Brussels Philharmonic, Orquestra Sinfónica do Porto Casa da Música and The Japan Symfonia.

Emmy-nominated and Royal Television Society award winning composer Nainita Desai is also the winner of the World Soundtrack Awards Discovery of the Year 2021 award, a BIFA, Cinema Eye Honors, and Ivor Novello nominee, a BAFTA Breakthrough Brit and the IFMCA Breakthrough Composer of 2020. Her recent projects include Oscar nominated, BAFTA and Cannes winning feature documentary For Sama, Sundance and BIFA winning feature The Reason I Jump, an immersive cinematic exploration of neurodiversity.

Film4 labelled her as one of the top 5 ‘composers of 2020 who should be on your radar’ and Mark Kermode, the UK's leading film critic placed her score for The Reason I Jump in the Top 3 film scores of 2021 with Empire Magazine championing her as one of the '5 film composers to watch out for 2022'.

Frank Ilfman has scored numerous TV dramas, documentaries and feature films including the hit black comedy horror, Big Bad Wolves, which saw him win the coveted Saturn Award for Best Original Music in 2014 ahead of John Williams, Howard Shore and Danny Elfman.

His innate ability to forensically diagnose how music can best contribute to the atmosphere of a film, coupled with his ability to create strong orchestral themes undercut with a brooding melancholy, has proved the perfect musical companion to projects in the horror and thriller genres. Ilfman scored the critically acclaimed Lionsgate horror Ghost Stories directed by Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman, starring Martin Freeman and Paul Whitehouse. Other recent credits include the original music for the Legendary Pictures Fanfare logo, The Operative starring Diane Kruger and Martin Freeman, the award-winning drama Rory's Way starring Brian Cox and Rosanna Arquette, and the Netflix/Studio Canal action film Gunpowder Milkshake.

Batu Sener wrote and contributed music for many of Hollywood’s major franchises like How to Train your Dragon, Star Wars, Ice Age and Bourne. As lead composer, Batu jumped into composing one of Hollywood’s largest franchises for his first feature animated motion picture: Ice Age. He scored the sixth film in the series: The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild, now earning the public’s choice nominee at WSA. He was also brought on to score a tv-series in the same franchise: Ice Age: Scrat Tales.

Batu composed additional music on beloved films like How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, Solo: A Star Wars Story, The Call of the Wild, Ferdinand, Pan and Jason Bourne, and most recently Don’t Worry Darling. Sener was also the score producer for these soundtracks.

In his young 20's, Joseph Metcalfe was invited to Los Angeles and mentored by some of Hollywood’s greatest composers including Jerry Goldsmith and Elmer Bernstein. His career took him around the world, including Europe where he founded the modern day Budapest film scoring orchestra in 2000.

Since moving back to Los Angeles in 2012 Metcalfe has worked on a variety of film, stage and theme park music for companies including Disney, EPCOT, Netflix, Amazon and a host of independent film productions. After the experience of leading a trio of composers for the score of The King’s Daughter, Joseph now runs a collaborative, scoring group of elite musicians from around the globe at his company, Sum Of All Music.

Los Angeles native composer John Coda has scored music for film and television since 1993. Drawn to music and songwriting since his teens, John played drums and performed in local bands, learning to play piano, guitar, and flute along the way. In recent years the multi- instrumentalist has added cello, guitar viol and nyckelharpa to his musical arsenal.

Recent works include The King’s Daughter (starring Pierce Brosnan and William Hurt), Warner Brothers Entertainment Cats And Dogs 3: Paws Unite, and Moonrise to be released later this year. John is also known in Hollywood for having penned the theme song for the hit Disney series That’s So Raven. The show’s success garnered him a BMI award and a Gold Record on Walt Disney Records.

Grant is a BAFTA nominated British composer who has created the soundtrack for video games that have sold in excess of 30 million copies. He has also recently scored the feature film The King’s Daughter starring Pierce Brosnan and William Hurt due for release January 2022. Grant’s score for Viva Piñata was nominated by BAFTA in the Original Score category in its 2007 awards.

His score for the feature film Shadows won best score at the Silicon Beach Film Festival in 2020 and his score for the animation The Wrong Rock was nominated for Best Original Score – Short Film (animation) at the Hollywood Music in Media awards 2021.

Vincent Cahay was born in 1973 in Brussels. He studied at the Conservatoire de Liège in the Dramatic and Performing Arts, he acts in different plays (Pietro Varraso, Arsenic, Vincent Hennebicq,…). In the 2000’s, he composes music for stage productions and for films. He starts collaborating with Fabrice du Welz in 2004 by composing the original score of Fabrice’s Calvaire. He composed the score for Anne-Cécile Vandalem’s show Tristesse in collaboration with Pierre Kisslong (Avignon 2016).

In 2020, for the big screen, he worked with Frederic Fonteyne and Anne Paulicevic on their latest feature film Fille de Joie and composes the score of Just Philippot’ La Nuée (nominated at the Critic’s Week in Cannes 2020). In 2021, for the theater, he cooperated again with Pierre Kissling on the new play of Anne-Cécile Vandalem, Kingdom. In 2022-2023, after Calvaire, Alleluia, Adoration and Inexorable, Cahay will start working on the score of Fabrice du Welz’s next feature film Maldoror.

Since 2008, Demusmaker(real name Blaise Delafosse) composes and produces music for cinema and television. It was the equally fantastic series Nus et Culottés for France 5 that gave him a real place in the audiovisual landscape. His very creative work, pop yet also urban, widely taken up and synchronized in the various flow programs, was quickly noticed by the music press.

After a few award-winning short films around the world, Demusmaker made his film debut with DIVINES, Houda Benyamina's eventful film, which won the Golden Camera at the Cannes Film Festival. Since then, he has been working on a number of projects, moving between auteur films and more popular TV series.

The Penelopes are an indie pop band from Paris, relocated to London,consists of Axel Basquiat and Vincent T. The Penelopes regularly appear at Cannes Film Festival and have provided music for Prada, Agnès b, further linking the group to the worlds of fashion and film. Besides their own works, the band have remixed Pet Shop Boys, Lana Del Rey, The Cure, Alt J, Tom Tom Club and The Ting Tings. The Penelopes were also the only French band invited to play at the Meltdown Festival curated by Robert Smith from The Cure in 2018.

The Penelopes are currently recording an album of duos with iconic French actresses including: Virginie Ledoyen, Asia Argento, and Isabelle Adjani, who last released an album in 1983 when she collaborated with the famous French songwriter, Serge Gainsbourg.

John has worked as a composer in a variety of mediums, including theatre, documentaries, video-games, as well as animated films, live projections, and lighting installations. He has also composed a number of concert works that have been performed around the world. When working on a project, John strives to compose music that supports and enhances the story and the visuals by encapsulating the emotional essence of their sum and providing the viewer with a complete experience.

He was also selected as the Winner of the Oticons Faculty International Film Music Competition in 2019 which provided him with mentoring by Hollywood veterans such as Richard Bellis, Gavin Greenaway, and Nick Wollage in the 2019 FMF Young Talent Award workshops (Poland), and Christopher Young in the 2019 Film Scoring Summer Programme (Bulgaria).

In 2014, just after university, Giacomo Rita attended the Film Music Lab at Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, in Rome. After this, he started working as a composer for various types of productions, such as animated and live-action films, trailers, advertising, corporate videos, production music libraries.

In 2017, he won the soundtrack category of “Premio Carlo Gargioni”, and in 2018 he was selected as a finalist in Pannonia Film Music Competition. Between 2019 and 2020 he attended the Master of Fine Arts in Music for Motion Pictures and Contemporary Media at Film Scoring Academy of Europe (Irish American University). In the course of this experience he had the opportunity to work on a short film produced by the London Film School, and to record and conduct my music with the European Recording Orchestra in Sofia.

Robert Wallace is a classically trained pianist and composer, now a film scorer in Los Angeles, CA, working under the multi award-winning composer Michael Abels. He has contributed extensively to projects like Allen v. Farrow (episode 4 of which, scored by him, was nominated for an Emmy), Nightbooks, Beauty and Breaking. He has won multiple national and international awards for piano performance and composition, including performing twice at Carnegie Hall and at Vienna’s Ehrbar Hall.

Germaine Franco is the first woman to score a Disney animated feature film with 2021’s Encanto, for which she received an Academy Award nomination and several other awards. Germaine co-wrote and produced five of Coco’s six original songs with co-director, Adrian Molina, including “Un Poco Loco” and “Proud Corazón”.

Franco scored Kung Fu Panda: Land of Awesomeness for Universal Studios Beijing, which garnered an SCL Award nomination for Outstanding Original Score for Interactive Media. In 2020 she scored two popular Netflix films, Work It and The Sleepover. Her work is heard in concert halls around the world including the Walt Disney Concert Hall with The Los Angeles Master Chorale and The Chicago Philharmonic.

Jonny Greenwood is Radiohead's innovative multi-instrumentalist and a celebrated composer for films such as Tran Anh Hung’s Norwegian Wood (2010), based on the novel by Murakami, and Lynne Ramsay's We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011) and psychological thriller You Were Never Really Here (starring Joaquin Phoenix). Greenwood became an Oscar nominee with his rich, elegant orchestral music for Phantom Thread, his fourth collaboration with director Paul Thomas Anderson (after There Will Be Blood, The Master and Inherent Vice).

In 2021 Greenwood delivered very different scores for the Princess Diana study Spencer and Jane Campion's explorative drama The Power of the Dog, as well as contributing to Anderson's coming-of-age film Licorice Pizza.

Composer and performer Daniel Hart made his feature film debut in 2013 with the critically acclaimed Ain't Them Bodies Saints, which began his collaboration with filmmaker David Lowery. Hart has composed the music for all of Lowery's films, including Pete's Dragon, A Ghost Story, Old Man and The Gun, and 2021's The Green Knight. Over the past decade, he has also scored multiple TV shows, from Fox's The Exorcist, to SMILF, to The Society. Hart has written music for This American Life, and composed the score for S Town.

Hart's musical career started on the road, as a hired gun for bands such as St. Vincent, Broken Social Scene and Other Lives. He continues to work in this field, having recorded strings for St. Vincent's 2021 album Daddy's Home, re-arranging songs for Anjimile's latest release Reunion, and writing new music for his own band Dark Rooms.

2021’s Madres paralelas marks Spain’s most acclaimed composer, four-time Oscar nominated Alberto Iglesias, 13th film with director Pedro Almodóvar, a partnership spanning more than 25 years. Their collaborations also includes La flor de mi secreto, Todo sobre me madre, Habla con ella, Volver, La piel que habito, Dolor y gloria and The Human Voice.

Iglesias’ four Oscar nominations include Madres paralelas, The Kite Runner, The Constant Gardener and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Iglesias has also composed the scores for Comandante by Oliver Stone, The Dancer Upstairs by John Malkovich, Che by Steven Soderbergh and Exodus: Gods & Kings by Ridley Scott. He won the World Soundtrack Award for Soundtrack Composer of the Year and Best Original Soundtrack of the Year for The Constant Gardener.

Daniel Pemberton is an Academy Award-nominated and Emmy-winning composer who was named Film Composer of the Year in 2021 by both the World Soundtrack Awards and the international film music critics association IFMCA. His credits include both award-winning blockbuster films such as Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, The Trial Of The Chicago 7, Birds of Prey, Enola Holmes and Ocean’s Eight as well as acclaimed documentaries such as The Rescue and the powerful Paralympics documentary Rising Phoenix. He was nominated for a BAFTA for his score to Aaron Sorkin’s Being The Ricardos.

Recent work includes the Dreamworks animation film The Bad Guys, Focus Features' Brian And Charles and the Apple TV series Slow Horses for which he also co-wrote the title theme “Strange Game” with the legendary Mick Jagger.

Hans Zimmer has scored more than 500 projects across all mediums and has been honoured with two Academy Awards, three Golden Globes, four Grammys, an American Music Award, and a Tony Award.

His work highlights include Dune, No Time to Die, Gladiator, Rain Man, The Dark Knight  trilogy, Inception, Thelma and Louise, The Last Samurai, 12 Years A Slave, Blade Runner 2049 (co-scored with Benjamin Wallfisch) and Dunkirk, as well as recent film scores including Top Gun: Maverick, Wonder Woman 1984 and The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run. Most recently, Zimmer won the Academy Award for Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures for Dune.

Emmy-winning and Academy Award-nominated composer, pianist, and producer Nicholas Britell is known for his critically-acclaimed scores, including those for Adam McKay’s 2021 Don’t Look Up, Barry Jenkins’ 2018 If Beale Street Could Talk and Jenkins’ 2017 Academy Award Best Picture winner Moonlight. He wrote the score for Adam McKay’s The Big Short, which marked the start of his collaboration with the Academy Award-winning writer-director.

He went on to win the Film Composer of the Year at the WSA in 2019. Britell’s upcoming film projects include writing the score for Jenkins’ The Lion King for Walt Disney Pictures. For television, Britell scores HBO's Succession, for which he won an Emmy in 2019. Britell’s score and main title theme have become some of the most talked about music for television.

Natalie Holt is a multi-award-winning British composer, known for her two-time Emmy-nominated score for Marvel Studios’ Loki and the acclaimed Lucasfilm series Obi-Wan Kenobi. Her film and television credits include the BAFTA Award-winning series Wallander (BBC), mini-series Deadwater Fell, the Emmy Award-nominated series The Honourable Woman (HBO Max), Victoria (PBS), Saul Dibb’s World War I feature Journey's End and Fox’s female superhero feature The Princess, to name just a few.

Natalie’s numerous awards nominations and wins include the Primetime Emmy Awards, World Soundtrack Awards’ “Television Composer of the Year”, BAFTA, SCL Awards, the Royal Television Society Craft and Design Award, the HMMAs, and “Best International Score” at the Beijing International Film Festival.

In a career spanning more than six decades, John Williams has become one of America’s most accomplished and successful composers, and he remains one of our nation’s most distinguished and contributive musical voices. He has composed the music for more than one hundred films, including all nine Star Wars films, the first three Harry Potter films, Superman, JFK, Memoirs of a Geisha, Home Alone and The Book Thief.

His nearly 50-year artistic partnership with director Steven Spielberg has resulted in many of Hollywood’s most acclaimed and successful films, including Schindler’s List, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, Jaws, Jurassic Park, the Indiana Jones films, Munich, Saving Private Ryan and The Post.

Jung Jae-il is a distinctive music composer & producer continuously surpassing expectations beyond various genres, including but not limited to contemporary, film soundtracks, musicals, Jazz, and pop. As a cultural creator of South Korea, Jung Jae-il has participated in various musical activities and performances, including film scores, Korean Opera/play, musicals as well as trendy pop music. Jae-il is well-known for his achievements in the crossover between traditional Korean music and other music genres.

He is the composer and music director of Parasite, directed by Bong Joon-ho and winner of four Oscars, and his most recent project is the Netflix global hit series Squid Game, directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk. Jung Jae-il is also nominated for the Outstanding Original Main Title Theme Music at the 74th Primetime Emmy Awards.

Hesham Nazih is an award-winning and Emmy-nominated Egyptian composer best known for his unique style that interweaves a mix of melodies from different cultures, creating an authentic genre all his own. He has scored over 40 award-winning films that have dominated the Egyptian box office such as director Marwan Hamed’s musically-intense horror features Blue Elephant and Blue Elephant: Dark Whispers, as well as director Tarek Alarian’s Sons of Rizk 1-2.

Nazih marked his first major English language project with his Emmy-nominated score for Marvel Studios’ Moon Knight on Disney+, for which he was also invited to become a member of The Television Academy. He has also composed for critically acclaimed Egyptian television works including The Seven Commandments and Every Week Has a Friday, which earned Egypt its first-ever International Emmy nomination.

Theodore Shapiro has scored some of Hollywood’s classic comedies including Old School, Tropic Thunder, Dodgeball, and Blades of Glory, as well as political dramas, animated adventures, unconventional adventures (The Secret Life of Walter Mitty) and mysteries (A Simple Favor).

He pulled a jazzy score with Gene Hackman in Heist, accentuated the tyranny of Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada, made the tears flow in Marley & Me, and found the humanity in an incorrigible Bill Murray in St. Vincent. His score for the dark police drama, Destroyer, starring Nicole Kidman was described by The A.V. Club as “knife-on-bone.” His most recent score for Bombshell, a drama about sexual harassment at Fox News, is evocatively centred around wordless female vocals.

Award-winning composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer is a classically trained musician, producer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist. In 2011 he scored his first mini-series, Marc Munden's The Crimson Petal and the White, which was nominated for a BAFTA. He went on to score many award-winning cult series such as Utopia, Humans, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams - Crazy Diamond, which earned him an Emmy-nomination. His music for the C4 mini-series National Treasure earned him a BAFTA.

His music for the season 4 finale of Netflix' dark sci-fi anthology series Black Mirror: Black Museum put him further on the international scoring map. His first feature film The Girl with all the Gifts opened the Locarno Film Festival. He won in the Best Original Music category at the 24th Festival International du Film Fantastique Gérardmer and the film also won the Public Choice Award. His outstanding tribal score for Mike White's The White Lotus (HBO), lightened up the days for audiences during the pandemic and has been widely acclaimed since. The three time Emmy-nominated composer has received awards from the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada and the Royal Television Society.