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Nainita Desai | Composer

Nainita Desai | Composer

Nainita has always been obsessed with music. As a child she played five instruments, and if she wasn’t playing it was because she was singing. Feeling pressured to get an academic education, she initially studied maths, but immediately followed up with a post-grad in music information technology. Her first foray into film was as a sound editor and recordist. Although fascinated by the technical side, Nainita craved a more creative role and so began working as a music engineer for artists such as Peter Gabriel and Ravi Shankar.

Nainita often thought back to trips with her dad to Streatham Odeon as a child, and of the incomparable excitement she felt there, and she knew composing for film was where her future lay. She met a music supervisor who got her an opportunity to compose a Channel 4 travel programme, and by 2004 she had scored her first short. Since then, Nainita has built a reputation for powerful, distinctive scores, with her most recent for The Confessions of Thomas Quick earning her a 2016 Music+Sound Award for Best Music in a Feature Film.

She describes composition as a “never-ending pool… I can allow my imagination to run wild and hopefully create a sound world that takes the viewer on a journey.