“Love for storytelling is an understatement. I deeply care about finding the right music to help a story grab an audience’s attention and carry them through an emotional journey, while being able to make them forget the outside world for a brief moment. That is my goal.”

João is a Portuguese composer, born in 1987 in Madeira Islands, Portugal. He started learning the piano at age 6 at the local Modern Piano Academy, and at age 12, became a self taught guitar player.

When he decided to pursue a career in music, he applied to the Professional Course at Madeira’s conservatory for classical guitar. Hundreds of hours of practice earned him a spot in the conservatory’s professional course as the first student to be accepted with no formal training. Three years later, he concluded that program’s last exam with the top grade in his class.

Driven to reach beyond the boundaries of his native island, João applied and got accepted to the Berklee College of Music in Boston in 2007. A highlight of his time there was working as an orchestrator for a 3-time Emmy nominee composer, Sheldon Mirowitz, during his last semester, 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. He graduated Magna Cum Laude in 2011 with a diploma in Film Scoring.

Since then, Joao has been working in Portugal. His latest projects have included composing for “The Third Attempt”, a dramatic short movie that has 17 international film selections; “Raising Sleeping Stones”, the world’s first ebook novel with its own original score; and combined some film scoring techniques in his metal band “Lights of Nightmares”, which helped them earn “Best Portuguese New Band Of The Year” by SounD/ZonE.

Apart from composing, João also enjoys sharing his knowledge by teaching guitar and music composition classes and has given workshops in Funchal, London and Dublin.

Recently, in 2015, João moved to Dublin.