Wojciech Kilar was a Polish classical and film music composer. One of his greatest successes came with his score to Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1992, which received the ASCAP Award and the nomination for the Saturn Award for Best Music. In 2003, he won the César Award for Best Film Music written for The Pianist, for which he also received a BAFTA nomination.
Joan Tower is a Grammy-winning contemporary American composer, concert pianist and conductor. Lauded by The New Yorker as "one of the most successful woman composers of all time", her bold and energetic compositions have been performed in concert halls around the world. After gaining recognition for her first orchestral composition, Sequoia (1981), a tone poem which structurally depicts a giant tree from trunk to needles, she has gone on to compose a variety of instrumental works including Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, which is something of a response to Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man, the Island Prelude, five string quartets, and an assortment of other tone poems. Tower was pianist and founding member of the Naumburg Award-winning Da Capo Chamber Players, which commissioned and premiered many of her early works, including her widely performed Petroushskates.
Sir Richard Rodney Bennett was an English composer of film, TV and concert music, and also a jazz pianist and occasional vocalist. He was based in New York City from 1979 until his death there in 2012.
Steven Isserlis is a British cellist. An acclaimed soloist, chamber musician, educator, writer and broadcaster, he is widely regarded as one of the leading musicians of his generation. He is also noted for his diverse repertoire and distinctive sound which is deployed with his use of gut strings.
John Harris Harbison is an American composer, known for his symphonies, operas, and large choral works.
Donatas Banionis was a Soviet and Lithuanian stage and film actor and theatre director. He has more than 80 credited roles in cinema and is best known for his performance in the lead role of Tarkovsky's Solaris as Kris Kelvin. He was born in Kaunas, Lithuania.
Josh Ralph, known professionally as J. Ralph, is an American composer, producer, singer/songwriter and social activist who focuses on creating awareness and change through music and film.
Dr. Titas Petrikis is a music composer and visual artist. He gained his PhD in film and sound composition at Bournemouth University in 2014. His research explored the relation of sound design and music in films, and how soundtracks may be used to create a contextual, multi-layer meaning. Petrikis has also received his master's degree in music composing for films at Bournemouth University in 2006.
Arūnas Matelis is a Lithuanian documentary film director. From 1979 till 1983 Arūnas Matelis studied Mathematics at Vilnius University and later in 1989 graduated from the Lithuanian Music Academy. In 1992, he established one of the first independent film production companies in Lithuania, "Nominum". In 2006 Matelis became a full member of European Film Academy with the right to vote.
Visas and Virtue is a 1997 narrative short film directed by Chris Tashima and starring Chris Tashima, Susan Fukuda, Diana Georger and Lawrence Craig. It was inspired by the true story of Holocaust rescuer Chiune "Sempo" Sugihara, who is known as "The Japanese Schindler". Sugihara issued over 2,000 transit visas to Polish and Lithuanian Jews from his consulate in Kaunas, Lithuania, in August 1940, in defiance of his own government (Japan), thereby allowing an estimated 6,000 individuals to escape the impending Holocaust.
Sidabrinė gervė are the Lithuanian film industry awards for best actors, directors and films. The annual awards were presented from 2008 on by AVAKA, the (national) Association for Author Rights of Audiovisual Artists. The award statuette was created by Audrius Liaudanskas. In 2019 the Lithuanian Film Academy, which presented the awards, retired due bankruptcy. As a result the awards for that year were cancelled. Lithuanian film industry awards "Silver Crane" returned in 2020 and was held by the Audiovisual works copyright association AVAKA, which, after announcing the competition in 2019, acquired the rights to the „Silver Crane Award“.
Kaunas International Film Festival is a film festival founded in 2007 by Visos mūzos and held in October each year in Kaunas and Vilnius, Lithuania. It has at times visited other cities in the country, such as Panevėžys and Nida. Ilona Jurkonytė is the festival's artistic director and Tomas Tengmark is its programmer.
Quartet San Francisco is a non-traditional and eclectic string quartet led by violinist Jeremy Cohen. The group played their first concert in 2001 and has recorded five albums. Playing a wide range of music genres including jazz, blues, tango, swing, funk, and pop, the group challenges the traditional classical music foundation of the string quartet.
Simona Milinytė, also known as Simonna, is a Lithuanian actress and singer. From 2007 to 2011, she participated in numerous music competitions in European countries including Lithuania, Italy, and Turkey. Most notably, Simonna joined the national Eurovision Song Contest in Lithuania as the youngest contestant ever at the time, placed third in the semi-final and seventh in the National Final. In 2008, she released her first album titled 12. In December 2013, she released her second album, which was self-titled Simonna and consisted of 15 songs recorded in both Lithuanian and English. After 2014, Simonna had her music videos played by MTV and received a Vevo-certified channel.
Giedrius Antanas Kuprevičius is a Lithuanian composer and music educator.
Raminta Šerkšnytė is a Lithuanian composer, pianist and associate professor of composition. She is a laureate of the Lithuanian National Prize for Culture and Arts, in 2020 she was nominated (shortlisted) for a Gramophone Classical Music Award. Her De profundis for string orchestra (1998), composed when she was just twenty-two years of age, is one of the most popular and performed Lithuanian compositions across the world. Maestro Gidon Kremer described De profundis as “the calling card of Baltic music”.
The Summer of Sangailė is a 2015 romantic teen drama film written and directed by Alantė Kavaitė. It was screened in the Panorama section of the 65th Berlin International Film Festival. The film won the directing award in the dramatic world cinema category at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. It also won Best Film, Best Actress and best set design at the Silver Crane Awards. The film was selected as the Lithuanian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 88th Academy Awards but it was not nominated.
Severija Janušauskaitė is a Lithuanian stage and film actress, occasionally performing as a singer, composer, costume designer and fashion model. She is well known for her role in the drama film Star (2014), for which she received an Award for Best Actress at the Kinotavr Film Festival, a Golden Eagle Award for Best Supporting Actress as well as Nika Award and White Elephant Award nominations in several categories. Other popular works include the comedy film The Norseman (2015) as well as the TV series The Optimists and Babylon Berlin.
Out Stealing Horses is a 2019 Norwegian drama film directed by Hans Petter Moland. It was selected to compete for the Golden Bear at the 69th Berlin International Film Festival. At Berlin, the film won the Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution. It was selected as the Norwegian entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 92nd Academy Awards, but was not nominated.
Giedrė Žickytė is a Lithuanian film director, producer, documentary film maker.
