João Luís is a Portuguese composer, born in 1987 in Madeira Islands, Portugal, who is passionate about being able to tell a story through music. Inspired by Nightwish's Once album, João pursued a career in Film Scoring with the intent to expand on that kind of music but who ultimately fell in love with the film scoring world along the way. A highlight of his time was working as an orchestrator for a 3-time Emmy nominee composer, Sheldon Mirowitz, during his last semester at Berklee College of Music, re-composing the music for the silent-era masterpiece “Sunrise" and performing it live at a sold-out screening at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, where Sheldon, João and the rest of the team and musicians, all received a standing ovation.
Some of his projects include composing music for “The Third Attempt”, a dramatic short movie that has 17 international film selections; “Recovery”, an impactful short documentary which recounted the story of 3 sexual assault survivors that won "Short Award Winner" at Dublin Feminist Film Festival and "winner award of recognition" by IndieFEST Film Awards. He also scored for a 35min. documentary called "Madeira Film Experience" (currently in its 4th year running in Madeira) and was part of Dublin Comic-Con 2017, showcasing a Steam greenlit indie video-game, "Sons Of Sol", that also featured his music.
Recently, he provided a talk at Dublin World-Con 2019 regarding the behind the scenes of film-scoring and is working, among other projects, on a re-release of his old symphonic metal EP "Lights of Nightmares" and its follow-up concept album which will feature a much more cinematic approach.