BIO
Grace-Mary Burega is a composer of socially conscious documentaries, films, and media. She aims to use her strong thematic ideas as a call to action for various causes. Her music spans the orchestral, electronic, minimalist, and jazz genres. Grace Notes is her media composing company, for which she has scored over 35 documentaries, horror, comedies, animations, PSAs, advertisements, and video games to date.
Grace-Mary is a recent graduate of the Berklee Online Masters of Music in Film Scoring program, where she received the 2022 Student of the Year Award for Outstanding Graduate Student. She earned her undergraduate degree at Berklee College of Music in Film & TV Scoring and was awarded the 2020 Robert Share Award.
Grace-Mary is currently part of Ghetto Film School's 2022-2023 Emerging Composers program where Andrew Gross and Gil Talmi mentor her. She participated in the Society of Composers and Lyricists New York mentorship program for media composers in 2020-2021. She participated in the 2021 Women in Animation composer mentorship with Catherine Joy. Grace-Mary is mentored by film and games composer Nomi Abadi and has taken numerous workshops with composers such as John Lunn, Miriam Cutler, Anne-Kathrin Dern, Garry Schyman, Angel Velez, Conrad Pope, and Nan Schwartz.
Grace-Mary is the Secretary for the Female Composer Safety League, an organization created to ensure the safety, advancement, and empowerment of female composers in the music composing industry, and she is the Secretary for the organization Women in Film and Video of New England, which is dedicated to supporting the accomplishments of women working in the film, video, and new media industries. She is also currently a Recording Session Coordinator for the Screen Scoring department at Berklee College of Music.
As a woodwind musician on saxophones, clarinets, and flutes, Grace-Mary has performed at Carnegie Hall, the Newport Jazz Festival, Boston’s Symphony Hall, New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall, and the Berklee Performance Center. She has studied the saxophone with Bill Pierce and George Garzone and has received numerous Berklee awards for her achievements on the saxophone: the Joseph E. Viola Award, the Paul Wagner Award, the Lester Lanin Award, and the Professional Performance Division Woodwind Award.