Nainita Desai

Nainita Desai is the RTS winner for Best TV score and World Soundtrack Awards winner for Discovery of the Year 2021. She is a trailblazer in the world of film & TV who has brought her unique voice to the scores of hundreds of acclaimed films. She is also an Ivor Novello (2020), double BIFA, and Cinema Eye Honors nominee; a BAFTA Breakthrough, and the IFMCA Breakthrough Composer of the year.

Amongst various BAFTA, Oscar and Emmy acclaimed productions, Nainita’s recent projects include Oscar nominated and BAFTA, BIFA & Cannes winning feature doc For Sama, Sundance and BIFA winning feature The Reason I Jump, Bad Boy Billionaires (No1 Netflix series in India), Bafta nominated American Murder, Netflix’s most watched documentary to date, ITV crime drama series The Tower (Gemma Whelan),  BBC drama series Unprecedented (James Norton, Olivia Williams), and Interactive game / video game Telling Lies, the acclaimed release by Annapurna Interactive.

Recent scores include Kevin MacDonald’s The Day That Changed Britain, Netflix original Sophy: A Murder in West Cork.

Upcoming features include Netflix 14 Peaks (exec: James Marsh) and she is currently scoring primetime drama series BBC1 Crossfire (Keeley Hawes) and SKY’s Funny Girl (Gemma Arterton).

Following a degree in Maths and studying sound for film at the NFTS in the UK, Nainita began her career as a sound designer on feature films for directors including Werner Herzog and Bertolucci, as well as assistant music engineering for Peter Gabriel.

She moves seamlessly between working with orchestras, to creating scores that incorporate electronics, ethnic elements and found sound, all of which has informed her experimental and deeply immersive approach to composition.