Pedro H. da Silva is an award-winning Portuguese composer, multi-instrumentalist, and innovator of the Portuguese guitar. His multicultural work spans concert, film, and world music, with commissions from orchestras, foundations, dance companies, and chamber ensembles across the globe. He has performed and recorded his own works as a soloist with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, Buenos Aires Philharmonic, London Metropolitan Orchestra, and Orchestre Lamoureux, among others.
Da Silva’s film work has been featured in over sixty international festivals, earning awards at Cannes, South by Southwest, Tribeca, and the Venice Biennale. He has recorded guitar for two films by Oscar® winner Michel Gondry and created a music video with two of the producers of Everything Everywhere All at Once. His compositions have received numerous honors, including the International Portuguese Music Award (2017, 2024) and five ASCAP Plus Awards.
He has performed multiple times at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, Shakespeare’s Holy Trinity Church, the Louvre Museum, and Versailles Palace, among many others. Recent activities include composing, arranging, and performing for a sold-out series of Transclassical Rock concerts with orchestras in Argentina (2024), and for the 400th-anniversary memorial of Shakespeare’s death at Shakespeare’s Church in Stratford-upon-Avon — after which he was appointed composer and artist-in-residence with the Orchestra of the Swan (2016–19).
A dedicated educator, da Silva has taught composition, classical guitar, banjo, mandolin, and sitar at New York University for over thirteen years. He also presents masterclasses and lectures internationally on topics ranging from music and physics to art, music technology, and ethnomusicology. His sold-out courses at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York explored the relationship between music and visual art. He also lectured on Shakespeare and Music at Columbia University in 2024 (New York) and at the European Shakespeare Research Association during the world seminar at the University of Porto in 2025 (Portugal).
He holds a Doctorate in Composition and a Bachelor’s in Classical Guitar from the Manhattan School of Music, where his doctoral research explored more than two thousand musical scales and modes from around the world, integrating acoustical, ethnomusicological, historical, and set-theoretical standpoints.
Pedro H. da Silva continues to blur the boundaries between classical tradition and contemporary innovation through his transdisciplinary approach to composition, performance, and teaching.