V irginia’s music career began – and her older sister’s ended – around age four, when after listening to her sister’s painstaking attempts to master various pieces to perform for the family, she would sit down at the keyboard and play them by ear.

Almost from the moment she started playing, she started composing. By age eleven she had brought home her first composition prize from the local Kiwanis Festival. The judge proclaimed her composition “as good as the score of any Hollywood movie,” and so Virginia’s destiny was sealed.

Virginia Kilbertus is an award-winning and Emmy-nominated composer for film, television, and video games. She holds a Bachelor of Music in Composition from McGill University, a Master’s in Scoring for Film, Television and Video Games from the Berklee College of Music, and she is a graduate of the prestigious Slaight Music Residency at Norman Jewison’s Canadian Film Center. She has produced original scores for numerous films and series, arranged for such artists as Danny Michel and Sarah Slean, and has worked with prominent orchestras throughout Canada and Europe. Her most recent accomplishments include the original score for the feature film Astronaut, starring Richard Dreyfuss, the orchestration for The Lighthouse, starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe, and the original scores for Seasons 1 and 2 of the Hulu series Endlings, which earned her a SOCAN award and Emmy nomination in 2021.

Virginia’s performance training has been in classical piano, and has included seven years of study with University of Toronto professor Boyanna Toyich through the Toronto Royal Conservatory of Music, as well as with Marina Mdivani at McGill University. Her real love, however, has always been composition, and from a young age she began studying harmony and music theory through the Royal Conservatory. At McGill, which boasts one of the North America’s finest music schools, she completed a Bachelor of Music in Composition, graduating cum laude and with a citation for Outstanding Achievement in Composition. In addition to her extensive studies in classical composition and orchestration, Virginia spent several years working within McGill’s renowned Digital Sound Composition Studio on electroacoustic composition. Following her time at McGill, Virginia went on to complete a Master’s in Scoring for Film, Television and Video Games at the Berklee College of Music’s Valencia campus – a program recognized worldwide for its unparalleled hands-on and state-of-the-art instruction.

Virginia was born to compose. Her music draws on her own eclectic influences, fusing rich, classical orchestrations with electronics and jazz, and extended techniques to create a sound that is uniquely her own and which is tailored to suite each project.