João Filipe Guerreiro Pacheco was born in Lagos in 1998. He started and finished his first musical studies in the same city, in Academia de Música de Lagos, taking an interest with the saxophone, but ultimately deciding to change to the composition class with Helena Rita while also concluding the high school piano degree with João Rosa. Afterwards, he enrolled at Escola Superior de Música de Lisboa, where he concluded his bachelor’s degree in composition and is currently finishing his master’s degree in music teaching. As a student of ESML, he worked with João Madureira, Sérgio Azevedo, Luís Tinoco and Carlos Caires, while actively attending conferences with international composers such as the late Kaija Saariaho, Luigi Abate, and others.
As a compositor, he has focused his work on collaboration with other arts such as dance, video, illustration, the plastic arts, and the shadow theater. In the Algarve, he has been working continuously with Questão Repetida association on bringing the local audience closer to the arts, by including children, the elderly, and people with disabilities to the stage. In Lisbon, he was recently invited to participate in the 2022/2023 edition of the Victor Córdon program Jovens Compositores, where he, collaborating with other musicians, plastic artists, and choreographers, found his new passion, improvisation, something that he plans to incorporate in his newer music and in his classrooms. His most recent orchestral work earned him the second prize of the national competition Prémio de Composição SPA/Antena 2, and he has been moving towards the international circuits with is most recent work, which will be premiered in Utrecht, in the Netherlands.
