Paulina Derska
Composer, arranger, orchestrator
Graduated from the Karol Lipinski Academy of Music in Wroclaw (Composition and Theory of Music, an honours degree), University of Lodz (Spanish Philology with American Philology studies, an honours degree) and the music school of the I and II grade in Lodz (percussion and church organ).
Her passion towards music started with film soundtracks, with time expanding into theater and concert music. The interest that she’s had towards film music has encouraged her to broaden her education with additional courses such as: Hollywood Music Workshops (Vienna), Young Talent Award Masterclasses (Cracow), Fimucité Scoring Academy (Santa Cruz de Tenerife), British Academy of Film and Television (London) together with one-term studies in the Conservatorio EF Dall’Abaco (Verona). Her highly individually-led education path inspired Agata Zubel-Moc and Michal Moc to award her with the artistic residence in Iceland.
The consequence of her desire to tell stories through music has been her constantly-evolving collaboration with the theater community. Plays with her music have been staged in such theaters as:
– the Grotowski Institute in Wroclaw (‘Hercia’)
– Hans Christian Andersen Theater in Lublin (‘The Secret Garden’)
– Miniatura City Theater in Gdansk (‘The Good Job Pirates’)
– Polish Theater in Wroclaw (‘No Fiction’)
– Jan Dorman Theater in Będzin (‘The Golden’)
– Kazimierz Dejmek Nowy Theater in Lodz (‘Bahamut’)
– Puppet and Actor Theater in Lomza (‘The Little Mermaid’)
– Theater Academy in Cracow, the Wroclaw Department (‘Brought Up In a Barrel’, ‘Richard the IIIrd
She is also the composer of music to short movies (‘The House of Ada’, ‘The Dam’, ‘Surprise’), documentaries (‘Therapy’), animations (‘Inner Feeling’), and radio podcasts (‘Forsynt’, Latin-Amerikagruppene i Norge in Norway). In the same time, she has been successfully developing her career as an arranger, having made arrangements for four singles of the Australian opera singer Paul Ettore Tabone (‘Shallow’, ‘You’ll never walk alone’, ‘Sole’, ‘The Unknown Child’). Another outcome of this long-lasting collaboration is a full album with new arrangements of a selection of opera arias, broadway and pop songs, along with the original composer’s tango ‘Adiós’. The album will be published by the MGM group.
She has been awarded many scholarships, such as: LPP Erasmus (twice, by the University of Seville and the EF Dall’Abaco Conservatory in Verona), Strefa Kultury in Wroclaw, the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange and the Soroptimist Foundation for her artistic achievements. She is also a prizewinner of composition competitions, among which the most important ones are: Indie Film Music Competition (audience award), World Cup in Composition in Viene (IInd award in the orchestral category) and the Orchestral Competition of the Karol Lipinski Academy of Music 2020 (Ist place). Personally, she considers her monographic concert, organized by her Alma Mater in May 2022 to be a major achievement in her career.
Her other passions are sailing and foreign languages. She speaks fluently in Spanish, English and Italian. Her favourite language, though, remains music – and that’s the one she has chosen to tell the stories that will hopefully stand the test of time.