Biography

Zacarias M. de la Riva was born in Barcelona, Spain. He graduated summa cum laude from Berklee College of Music in Boston with a double major in Composition and Film Scoring, and entered the film industry as an orchestrator on titles such as Brad Anderson's The Machinist (2004), Alex de la Iglesia's 800 Bullets (2002) and Mortadelo & Filemon: The Big Adventure (2003), before building a career of his own with more than 60 film and television scores.

He is best known for the music of the animated saga Tad the Lost Explorer (Tadeo Jones). The first film (2012) earned him Goya, Gaudi and CEC nominations for Best Original Score, the second won the Quirino Award, and the fourth instalment, Tad the Lost Explorer and the Magic Lamp, directed by Enrique Gato, is due in cinemas in August 2026.

In 2014 he scored Automata, a science-fiction feature produced by and starring Antonio Banderas, which brought him numerous national and international awards for best original score, including the MundoBSO, Goldspirit and Reel Music awards and an IFMCA nomination. In 2021 he composed the music for Below Zero (Bajocero), which spent a week as Netflix's most-watched title worldwide, reaching over 50 million households.

His other international credits include Evolution by Lucile Hadzihalilovic (Special Jury Prize, San Sebastian 2015), Pet, Black Snow with Ricardo Darin, Bent with Sofia Vergara and Karl Urban, The Kill Team, and the Mexican Huevocartoon franchise, whose Little Rooster's Egg-cellent Adventure remains the highest-grossing animated film in Latin American history. For television he has scored the hit series Wrong Side of the Tracks (Entrevias, Musimagen Award 2025), Muted (Netflix) and The Invisible Girl (Disney+).

His concert music has been performed by orchestras including the Spanish Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra (RTVE), the Euskadiko Orkestra, the Bayerischer Rundfunk Orchester and the Orquesta Ciudad de Granada. He is an alumnus of the Sundance Composers Lab.
- IMDb mini biography by: Zacarías M. de la Riva