Nainita Desai

RTS award winning composer Nainita Desai is an Ivor Novello, BIFA and Cinema Eye Honors nominee; a Bafta Breakthrough Brit, and the IFMCA Breakthrough Composer of 2020. Amongst various Bafta, Oscar and Emmy acclaimed productions, Nainita's recent projects include Oscar 2020 nominated and Bafta & Cannes winning feature doc For Sama, Sundance 2020 winning feature The Reason I Jump, Bad Boy Billionaires (No1 Netflix series in India), American Murder Netflix's most watched documentary to date, BBC drama series Unprecedented (James Norton, Olivia Williams, Gemma Arterton), and Interactive game / video game Telling Lies, the acclaimed release by Annapurna Interactive. Film4 recently labelled her as one of the top 5 'composers of 2020 who should be on your radar' and her projects have been in the Top 5 Film Scores and Video Games scores of 2019 by Scala Radio. The PRS placed Desai at No 2 in their Top 10 female writers whose work was most used in Film & TV through 2018. Nainita's recent scores include Untamed Romania nominated for GOPO & IFMCA music awards; WW2 period drama Enemy Within; psychological horror Darkness Visible [BFI] and innovative series Fierce Queens for Quibi / BBC Studios. Other recent projects include BBC series Extraordinary Rituals, nominated for RTS and Music+Sound Best Music Awards; and the title theme for the prestigious BBC broadcast of the Royal Wedding of Meghan and Harry. Her upcoming film scores for 2021 include Netflix series The Sophy Story (Dir: John Dowers / EP: Simon Chinn); HBO Max film Persona (Dir: Tim Travers Hawkins), and video games for Electronic Arts and Project A, the follow up to Telling Lies by Drowning Mermaid. Outside of Film and TV, Nainita's upcoming new commissions include works for BBC Radio 3 'Postcards from Composers', acclaimed vocal ensemble Voces8, and a Music, Nature & Well-being experiment for BBC Radio. Nainita's musical foundations are rooted in world music and she moves seamlessly between working with orchestras, fusing her collection of custom made instruments, electronics, found sound as well as song-writing, which has led to collaborations with artists including Eivor (The Last Kingdom) and writing documentary musicals including the BBC acclaimed City of Dreams - A Musical. Coupled with a background in sound design and technical innovation that fuels her powerful emotive scores, her immersive approach involves deeply-researched collaborations to find those voices that are not usually heard, creating sounds that are truly unique. Nainita was born and brought up in London to Indian parents and her eclectic musical upbringing led her to studying the sitar, piano, guitar, tabla, singing and violin. Following a degree in Maths and attending the NFTS to study sound for film, As a sound designer, Nainita worked on feature films for Bertolucci (Little Buddha); and Werner Herzog (Lessons of Darkness) including Backbeat (Dir: Ian Softley), August (Dir: Anthony Hopkins), and cult cyber-feature Hackers (Angelina Jolie). Her passion for music technology then led to her working in music engineering with Peter Gabriel during the legendary Real World Recording Week sessions, and working with artists including Billy Cobham, Daniel Lanois, Jane Sibbery, Nigel Kennedy, Sinead O'Connor, and Ravi Shankar.