Petar Jovanov

Petar Jovanov was born in the city of Bitola, Macedonia, and migrated to Sydney Australia at the age of seven.

At eleven years of age he developed a passionate interest in music and learnt to play the piano and clarinet, upon which he started taking music lessons, and was classically trained on the piano. During his secondary education he studied music and discovered that he had a strong desire towards composition.

In 2005 he continued with his music studies at the University of Western Sydney (UWS) Australia, where by he graduated in 2009 with a Bachelor of Music (honours) degree. In 2013 Jovanov represented Australia with his composition Strange Ways (2013) as young composer at the 31st Asian Composers League Festival which was held in Singapore.

In 2013 Petar also composed an original filmscore for the short film The Water Vessel (dir. Iqbal Barkat, 2013). This film was an official selection for the 2014 Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. It also won an award of merit at The Indie Fest in 2013.

In 2014 Jovanov completed his post-graduate degree (Doctor of Creative Arts) at UWS under the guidance of his supervisors Dr. Bruce Crossman and Dr. Ian Stevenson. Petar’s film music is strongly influenced from his Macedonian culture. His postgraduate research focuses on creating a Macedonian-Australian compositional voice through a juxtaposition of traditional Hollywood film music conventions and Macedonian Folk music techniques.

In 2016 Petar was accepted into the Summer Composition Intensive program at St Mary’s College – University of Notre Dame South Bend, Indiana. Also in 2016, he was awarded a four-week artist residency at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Centre for the Arts in Nebraska.