Friday 5 May 2023

Introducing Gayathri Khemadasa:

Gayathri Khemadasa
Gayathri Khemadasa

Gayathri Khemadasa, a renowned Sri Lankan composer, has made history by winning an international award for her music in the 2020 film The Newspaper. In June 2022, she won the category for Best Music at the Ceylon International Film Festival in Santa Barbara, California and this marks the first time that Sri Lanka has won an international award for film music.  

Khemadasa's talent for creating innovative music has also caught the attention of the University of Portsmouth Choir in the UK. Her choral work, written to the text of a poem by Rabindranath Tagore, Freedom, was performed by the choir in what is a first for the university, which had never performed the works of an Asian composer before.  Freedom was performed by University of Portsmouth Choir, conducted by George Burrows, at St Mary's Church in Portsmouth, on Saturday 25 March, 2023

Born in Colombo, she studied music at the Prague Conservatory and Masaryk University, Czech Republic. She began performing in public in 2005, in order to raise money for the victims of the 2004 Asian tsunami.

Khemadasa's unique blend of Western classical music and traditional Sri Lankan music has garnered her critical acclaim and numerous awards. Her passion for music and the arts has also led her to found several organizations and initiatives aimed at promoting and supporting the development of music and the arts in Sri Lanka.  In 2011, she was awarded a Fulbright Professional Scholarship and became a visiting scholar at Wesleyan University where she began writing an opera on Phoolan Devi. In 2015, at the Derana Film Awards, Khemadasa became the first Sri Lankan woman to win a national award for Best Original Score with the film Thanha Rathi Ranga.

Gayathri Khemadasa's contributions to music and the arts continue to be celebrated both nationally and internationally, and her innovative approach to composition is sure to inspire and captivate audiences for years to come.

Full details from her website.

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