Yannis Kyriakides was born in Limassol (Cyprus) in 1969, emigrated to Britain 1975 and has been living in The Netherlands since 1992. He studied musicology at York University, and later composition with Louis Andreessen.
As a composer and sound artist he looks for ways of creating new forms and hybrids of media that problematize the act of listening. In the last years his work has been exploring different relations between words & music, both in concert compositions and installations through the use of systems of encoding information into sound, synthesizing voices and projected text.
His work has been performed worldwide at many of the prominent music festivals, and by many leading contemporary music ensembles. He has been featured composer at Fesitvals such as Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2007, November Music 2011, and Gaida Festival 2017.
Prizes have included the Gaudeamus prize in 2000 for a conSPIracy cantata, a French Qwartz award for the CD Antichamber, the Dutch Toonzetters prize for Paramyth, the Willem Pijper prize for Dreams of the Blind, an honorary mention at the Prix Ars Electronica for the CD Wordless and in 2014 the first prize in the International Rostrum of Composers for Words and Song Without Words.
Together with Andy Moor and Isabelle Vigier he founded and runs the CD label for new electronic music ’Unsounds’. He is a founding member of the ensemble Maze, and teaches composition at the Royal Conservatory of Music in The Hague.
