KALAISAN KALAICHELVAN is a composer and musician based in both Toronto, Canada and New York, NY. His compositional practice spans multiple disciplines, drawing from film, dance, theatre, installation and deals with themes of translation and transference.

Named by Ludwig Van as one of “six emerging Canadian composers to keep an eye on” and Playback’s 10 to Watch, his music has been performed and premiered by celebrated ensembles such as Pro Coro Canada, the Dior Quartet, NMC Ensemble and Extended Music Collective. Kalaisan is a 2021 Fellow of the prestigious Sundance Composers lab and is one of the awarded grantees of the Sundance Institute’s Art of Practice Fellowship. He has held residencies at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, NewAm Composers Lab, UCross Foundation, Avaloch Farm Music Institute and was an alumna of the Canadian Film Centre as one of the 2021 Slaight Music residents. Kalaisan was awarded the SOCAN Emerging Composer Award in 2023. He was also recently awarded the esteemed Kathleen McMorrow Award by the Ontario Arts Foundation in 2024 for the composition and presentation of contemporary classical music in Ontario. In 2023, Kalaisan wrote the music for the film In Flames, which was selected as the Pakistani entry for Best International Feature Film at the 96th Academy Awards. Kalaisan has scored feature films that have premiered at the Cannes Film Festival (“In Flames”), Toronto International Film Festival (“This Place”, “Shook”, “In Flames”), Santa Barbara International Film Festival (“Junglefowl”) and the AFI Film Festival (“Calabanta”). He is currently working on various commissions and scoring a new Netflix series directed by Simon Barry.

Kalaisan has been mentored by esteemed composers and music leaders such as Paul Wiancko and David Harrington of Kronos Quartet, Huang Ruo, Brian Current and Suzanne Farrin. Having worked across various disciplines and communities of thought, Kalaisan seeks to bring together incongruous institutions to build novel structures that reflect his artistic upbringing.