David Karagianis
Music Director, Resident Composer
dkaragia@lmu.edu
David Karagianis is a composer, sound designer, pianist, electronic musician, percussionist and educator. He serves as the Music Director for the Dance program. David's eclectic range and interests span film, dance, concert recital, theater and multimedia performance genres as well as classical, experimental, electronic, jazz, world, rock, pop and ambient stylistic boundaries. Having served as Senior Musician for the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures (formerly the UCLA Department of Dance) for over 20 years and before that as Music Director of the Kinetikos Dance Foundation/Dance LA, David has collaborated in a variety of roles with several generations of Modern and Post-Modern dance makers.
David has worked as a composer, sound designer and/or music director with numerous choreographers, dance companies, performance artists and film makers including the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, UCLA Dance Company, Regina Klenjoski, Sakoba Dance Theatre, David Rousseve, Pat Catterson, Victoria Marks, Dan Wagoner, Doug Neilsen, Sen Hea Ha, Ledges and Bones, Chad Michael Hall, A Ludwig Dance Theatre, John Pennington, Denise Uyehara, Liam Clancy, Janet Roston, Sharon Kinney, Cheng-Cheih Yu, Oni Dance, and Janis Brenner & Dancers. An accomplished improvisatory pianist and percussionist, David has served as accompanist for Alwin Nikolais, Joe Goode, Bill T. Jones, Donald Byrd, the Alvin Ailey Dance Company, the Martha Graham Company, the Limon Dance Company, Maria Gillespie and many others.
Awarded the Lester Horton Award for Outstanding Achievement in Sound: Music/Sound/Text, a winner in the Festival des Arts de Saint-Sauveur Competition for Music Composition for Dance and a recipient of Meet The Composer grants, over seventy of David's scores for dance, concert, theater, video and multi-media have been performed or screened throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. David is a Founding Member and a former Vice President of the International Guild of Musicians in Dance (2001-2004). David has created four CDs of music all composed, performed and produced for his Sound Dance® label: "Timeless" (1997), "Without Words" (2000), and "Brave New Age" (2004) and his most recent release "Multiplex" (2009).