Biography

Christopher Willis composes the music to Disney's Mickey Mouse (2013), and co-writes the music to the Emmy Award-winning show Veep (2012). He has also (as an "additional music" composer) contributed to a number of major Hollywood movies, including The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2 (2012), X-Men: First Class (2011), Winnie the Pooh (2011), Shrek Forever After (2010) and Bedtime Stories (2008). He grew up in England and was a concert pianist, musicologist and concert composer before moving to California to pursue a film music career. He read music at the University of Cambridge and studied the piano at the Royal Academy of Music. Later he returned to Cambridge to write a PhD on the music of Domenico Scarlatti. His music has been played in the BBC Proms and on BBC Radio, and he has contributed a number of articles to scholarly journals and a chapter in the book Domenico Scarlatti Adventures.
- IMDb mini biography by: Christopher Willis

Emmy Award-winning composer, arranger, songwriter, and pianist Christopher Willis enjoys an unusually diverse career that spans film and television soundtracks, interactive media, popular music, and concert works. He trained as a concert pianist at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and later as a musicologist, earning a PhD on eighteenth-century music from Cambridge University.

Building on the success of his collaboration with Armando Iannucci on the hit HBO comedy series Veep, his acclaimed Soviet-inspired score to Iannucci's dark political satire The Death of Stalin won Best Original Score for a Comedy Film by the International Film Music Critics Association. Their third collaboration, The Personal History of David Copperfield, starring Dev Patel, was awarded IFMCA's 2020 Film Score of the Year.

Known for his insatiable curiosity and for the depth and commitment of his research into every project, he has written in nearly every musical genre imaginable, particularly in the field of animation. For ten years, Willis was the musical mastermind behind Paul Rudish's Mickey Mouse cartoon shorts. His work on those shows earned him five Annie Awards and three Emmy nominations. But it was another cartoon project, Charlie Brooker's interactive Netflix show Cat Burglar, that won Willis the first ever Children's and Family Emmy Award for Outstanding Music Direction and Composition for an Animated Program.

Continuing a songwriting collaboration that began on the Mickey Mouse shorts, Willis and his wife Elyse co-wrote "Nothing Can Stop Us Now," the centerpiece song of Mickey & Minnie's Runaway Railway, a major new ride-through attraction at Walt Disney World and Disneyland. Willis composed and arranged all the underscore and area music for the ride as well.

His eclectic body of work also includes Apple TV+'s Schmigadoon! (Primetime Emmy nomination), Disney Junior's The Lion Guard, Netflix's Black Mirror, Bill Burr's directorial debut Old Dads, the Rumi-inspired animated feature Lamya's Poem, and an album of new orchestral arrangements of songs by the late Eva Cassidy, I Can Only Be Me, recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra.
- IMDb mini biography by: Bradley Rainey (Agent)