Wayne Lavallee

Wayne Lavallee is a Métis singer-songwriter, recording artist, producer and award-winning film score composer whose music moves between contemporary sound, Indigenous musical expression and deeply cinematic storytelling. Based in Vancouver, Canada. Lavallee’s artistic life began long before the recording studio or scoring stage. He received his first guitar at the age of five and went on to study music privately for many years. His creative path later expanded into theatre, movement and performance. In the early 1990s, he trained as an actor with Spirit Song Native Theatre Company and became an original ensemble member of Full Circle First Nations Performance. Throughout the decade, he performed as an actor and dancer on stages across Canada, an experience that would profoundly shapet he way he would eventually approach music for picture.
That foundation in performance and storytelling became central to Lavallee’s evolution as a composer. Before establishing himself in film, he built a distinguished career as a singer-songwriter and recording artist. He released his first solo studio album in 2000 and went on to earn national and international recognition for his songwriting and recordings. His acclaimed albums Green Dress and Trail of Tears brought him two Juno Award nominations and a collection of major honours, including a Canadian Folk Music Award for Best Indigenous Songwriter, multiple Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards, and recognition at the Indian SummerMusic Awards. By 2010, Lavallee had become a multi-award-winning recording artist with an international recording presence through the French label in Paris Dixiefrog Records, bringing his music to audiences beyond Canada and earning praise for a sound rooted in powerful songwriting, spirituality and Indigenous identity. It was in film composition, however, that Lavallee found another profound extension of his artistic voice. In 2014, he composed his first film score for "Ballads Not Bullets" a National Film Board of Canada production written and directed by acclaimed Métis playwright, filmmaker and directorMarie Clements. The collaboration opened the door to a significant creative partnership and a growing body of work in Indigenous cinema.

Lavallee has since become an important musical voice in the filmsof Marie Clements, contributing scores to major productions including
The Road Forward, Holy Angels, Red Snow, Bones of Crows, and other film and screen projects. His work has also extended into television and documentary storytelling, including thea cclaimed series Dr. Savannah: Wild Rose Vet. His score for The Road Forward helped support one of the most ambitious Indigenous musical documentaries produced in Canada, while his work on Red Snow established him as acomposer capable of bringing emotional depth and cultural resonance to dramatically different stories. His growing body of screen work earned multiple Leo Award nominations and recognition within Canada's film and television industry. A major milestone in Lavallee’s scoring career came with
Bones of Crows (co-composed by Jesse Zubot) the sweeping feature film directed by Marie Clements, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2022. The project brought together many of the elements that define Lavallee’s compositional voice: character, memory, landscape, history, traum aand spirit. For Bones of Crows, Lavallee's work received significant recognition, including a Leo Award for Best Original Score. He was also honoured, alongside collaborators Marie Clements and Jesse Zubot for the original song “You Are My Bones,” which won the Canadian Screen Music Award for Best Original Song and received major Canadian screen-award recognition. The continuing Bones of Crows
story also brought further recognition for his screen composition work, including Canadian Screen Music Award and Canadian Screen Award nominations. 

Lavallee’s approach to film music is inseparable from his experience as a multidisciplinary artist. He reads a script not only as a composer, but through the eyes of an actor and storyteller. For him, the score begins with narrative: dialogue, landscape,movement, silence and character all become part of the musicallanguage. His sound is contemporary and cinematic, yet often carries echoes of Indigenous musical traditions through stylized vocables, primal rhythm, organic textures and spiritually charged soundscapes inspired by the cultures and landscapes of the West Coast and the Prairies. Rather than using music simply to fill silence, Lavallee approaches each score as an emotional and narrative force, creating character-based themes and allowing the music to travel with the story. At the heart of his work is a belief that music must serve the truth of the narrative. That philosophy has carried Wayne Lavallee from the theatre stage to award-winning recordings, from international touring to some of Canada's most important contemporary Indigenous films. Today, his career stands as a rare convergence of songwriter, performer, producer and screen composer: an artist whose music is shaped by lived experience, cultural memory and an instinctive understandingof story. With two Juno Award nominations, a Canadian Folk Music Award, multiple Indigenous music honours, Leo Award recognitionins, including wins for original score, and Canadian Screen MusicAward recognition, Wayne Lavallee continues to build a distinctive body of work at the intersection of music, cinema and Indigenous storytelling. Whether writing a song or composing for the screen, Lavallee creates music that seeks something deeper than accompaniment.His work gives voice to character and landscape, carries memory across generations, and invites the listener into a cinematic journey that is emotional, spiritual and unmistakably his own.