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Dr Gina Ismene Chitty is an Australian of multi cultural origin, an Eurasian Sri Lankan pianist-composer of piano, voice, ensemble and orchestral works published by Wirripang, the leading publisher of Australian composers in Australia. Her pieces are performed internationally - including the UK, Netherlands, USA, UK, Poland and Germany.

Between the years 2020 and 2024 she has penned over 50 compositions and has produced approximately 30 Wirripang publications.

The most popular have been her solo piano compositions, deeply personal and expressive which have been inspired by evocations of futuristic visual stimuli, from the more abstract higher dimensional points of relative arrangements within tone intervals, to cheerful robotic beings and time travelling Germanic "baroque bears " who engage in culturally colourful fetes of foreign festivity such as Arabian wedding parties and encounters with exotic princesses and medieval street jongleurs.

Gina's music is particularly popular with younger concert pianists such as the Polish pianist Jakub Niewiadomski who writes:

"I have had the privilege of performing two of Dr. Gina Ismene Chitty's piano compositions in recent times in Krakow, Poland. I enjoyed immensely the intense dramatic impact of these pieces, with their little repetitive riffs, fast technical passages, complex harmonies and rhythms. An outline of a very unique compositional style! "

The Germany based Jun- Ho Gabriel Yeo, who competes regularly in International piano competitions writes:

"I had the privilege of performing Dr. Gina Ismene Chitty's The Dance of the Robotic Cyborg recently at two venues.

The first, in my home country Germany at the Richard-Jacoby-Saal in Hannover and the next time at the Sydney International Piano Competition. I immediately liked the groovy character with interconnected accents, which is really fun to play.

I had some kind of a futuristic feeling while playing it, the cyborg came alive, first slowly then more and more."

Gina had two world premieres of her music at the Sydney International Piano Competition in July 2023, where her works were selected by 4 competitors.

Gina illustrates the covers of her publications with her own sketches, caricatures and paintings.

Gina holds a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from Macquarie University and is the author of an ethnomusicological discussion of a hybrid cultural form of Afro-Lusitania music-'Public Postures, Private Positions' - an ethnomusicological discussion of a hybrid cultural form of Afro-Lusitanian music.

Gina has also been a finalist in several piano concerto competitions and the winner of a Tchaikovsky piano competition held in Colombo, Sri Lanka which won her a place at the prestigious Moscow Conservatory of Music. However, a family diplomatic appointment took her to Washington DC, USA, instead, where she graduated at the George Washington University.

She has had solo performances in many countries, performing the concerti of Rachmaninoff, Liszt and Beethoven. She is a Fellow of the Trinity College of Music London and a Licentiate of the Royal Schools of Music.

Gina enjoys writing piano pieces for children - based on a fictional character she calls a Grimmolow. The first performance of her original Grimmolow piece was by Dr Katie Zhukov, which was followed by publication in the " Australian Women Composers Antholology Volume Three". Yet another Grimmolow piece from a new trilogy composed earlier this year will be premiered at the Australasian Piano Pedagogy Conference at Monash University in July this year.

Biography provided by the composer — current to July 2024