Born in Athens, Greece in 1981 composer Kornilios Selamsis is an artist balancing between contemporary music and music in theatre -his two main activities- that merge into an obsession for the multiple natures of spoken language and into language as a musical archetype. He has studied piano with prof. Yorghos Manessis in Athens and composition in the Koninklijk Conservatorium in The Hague, under the guidance of Gilius van Bergeijk, Cornelis de Bondt and Martijn Padding.

During his studies in The Hague he was an active conductor performing more that 30 premieres of contemporary pieces amongst them two chamber operas [Korzo theatre], new pieces for orchestra and a reworking of Louis Andriessen’s De Staat.

Works of his have been commissioned and performed, amongst others, by the Athens State Orchestra, the Łódz Philharmonic orchestra, the Orchestra of Colours, the Hellenic Ensemble of Contemporary music, the Greek Composers Union, Ensemble Artéfacts, the Nieuw Ensemble, the ASKO ensemble, Ensemble Ereprijs, Ventus wind ensemble, in several venues in the Netherlands, Greece, Canada, France and Switzerland. In the years 2013-2016 Kornilios has composed a full length opera based on Georg Buchner’s comedy Leonce and Lena. The piece was commissioned and performed within the Athens Festival in July 2016.

Residing again in Athens since winter 2011 Kornilios has been actively participating in the cultural life of the city as a composer of concert music as well as in theater productions having created more than 40 compositions and occasionally participating as a live performer and improviser on stage. Since 2007 he has been closely collaborating with the acclaimed Greek theatre director Thomas Moschopoulos performing a research on the musical aspects of ancient Greek tragedies. This research resulted to five productions staged by the Greek National theatre [Alcestis, Trachiniae], the Athens Festival [Bacchae], the Stratford Shake-speare Festival in Canada [Electra] and National theater of Northern Greece [Iphigenia in Tauris].

In the fall of 2015 Kornilios Selamsis was appointed by the Greek National Theatre to formulate a workshop for Composition in Theatre that begun it’s sessions with the objective of investigating the strategies of Musical Dramaturgy yet it soon transformed into a three year long composition course that counts in three academic periods 20 students.

From May 2014 till March 2017 he was the Artistic Director of the concert series “Parallel Thirds” that took place in Porta theater in Athens and produced 61 concerts ranging from Early music to freely improvised new forms of music and sound and commissioned 15 new works by composers in Greece and abroad.