WSA Film Music Days - Diversity Fires Creative Collaboration: A Discussion with the Composers Diversity Collective

By offering education and mentorship for – and increasing the visibility of – minoritized industry creatives, the Composers Diversity Collective, which will be awarded the 2025 WSA Industry Award, advocates for a more inclusive screen industry. During this panel discussion the collective’s founder Michael Abels and co-presidents Amritha Vaz and Sandro Morales-Santoro will dispel some of the normative assumptions that often underpin these identity-based barriers, for instance about these workers’ limited creative and stylistic range.

Panelists:

Michael Abels is a two-time Emmy-nominated composer best known for his groundbreaking scores for Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Us, and Nope. Throughout his career, Abels has been widely acclaimed, receiving among others the World Soundtrack Award for Discovery of the Year, the Jerry Goldsmith Award, and the Pulitzer Prize.

Amritha Vaz is a Sundance Composers Lab alumna whose recent work on Disney’s Mira: Royal Detective earned her two Annie nominations and an ASCAP composer’s choice award for Best TV Score. Prior to scoring film and television projects, Vaz was a human rights attorney, so her interest remains in telling stories with purpose.

Sandro Morales-Santoro is an award-winning Venezuelan composer working across film, television, and interactive media. His credits include National Geographic/Disney+’s Restaurants At The End Of The World, WeTV’s Kold x Windy, Marvel Animation’s The Secret History of Venom, the Parmount+ documentary Explant, and Miguel Ferrer’s The Shadow of the Sun.

Moderator:

Salma Mediavilla Aboulaoula is a film and media scholar and PhD researcher at Ghent University’s Centre for Cinema and Media Studies (CIMS). She has written columns for De Standaard on, among other things, the representation of diasporic identities in film and media. She is also part of Film-Plateau, the university’s film club, where she helps curate films and lead conversations on film, identity, and politics.

Accredited visitors can attend this event for free, without prior registration. Other visitors are required to present a ticket.

Language: English