Alysha Brilla is a 2025 Women in Music International Leadership Honouree, 2024 Canadian Screen Award nominee and three-time JUNO Award-nominated songwriter, composer, producer, sound artist and former Berklee College of Music professor.
 

Guided by her Indo-Tanzanian roots and Great Lakes spirit, Brilla creates work at the intersection of music, culture, ecology and community. Her practice moves fluidly between songwriting, live performance, film composition, music production, field recording and experimental sound, exploring the relationships between sound, place, ancestry and cultural memory.

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Raised along the Grand River in Southern Ontario, Brilla developed an early relationship with water, land and environmental sound that continues to shape her work. Birds, insects, water, weather and other natural sounds increasingly appear within her compositions, not simply as ambience but as musical voices themselves. Her growing interest in bioacoustics explores how animals and ecosystems communicate through sound and what musicians might learn by listening beyond the human world.
 

Underlying this work is an interest in cosmology and the ways spiritual and ancestral traditions understand relationships between humans, land, water, animals and the unseen world. Brilla approaches sound as more than an aesthetic material: it can carry memory, transmit knowledge, create ritual, connect generations and offer ways of understanding our place within a larger living system.
 

Brilla has worked collaboratively with communities across Canada on projects involving land and animal based sounds, songs, language and place-based sonic knowledge, including an ongoing language preservation project with the Heiltsuk Nation in Northern British Columbia. These experiences have deepened her commitment to attentive listening, ethical recording and the relationship between ecology, culture, memory and community.
 

Community participation is also central to Brilla’s environmental practice. Her song and animated film Water explored the interconnectedness of global water systems through an open community call inviting participants, many of them young people, to create drawings of ocean animals that were subsequently animated into the film. Through projects like these, Brilla uses joy, imagination and accessible art-making to invite broader audiences into conversations around conservation and ecological interdependence.
 

As a composer and producer, Brilla’s musicality extends beyond the stage. She composed the original score for Fawzia Mirza’s acclaimed feature film The Queen of My Dreams, earning a Canadian Screen Award nomination for Original Music. Her interdisciplinary work also includes Dare to Dream, a short film integrating her original composition with field recordings of birds, water and ecological sound to evoke connection between self and the natural world. Across her screen and experimental work, Brilla is increasingly interested in environmental sound as an active compositional collaborator rather than a background element.
 

Brilla’s musical language draws from Western, Indian and East African musical practices alongside folk, soul, improvisation, global percussion and contemporary production. Rhythm, voice and layered acoustic textures are central to her work, while her evolving creative research examines how sound travels across geography and generations. Water has become a recurring sonic material and metaphor within this practice: a carrier of movement, memory, migration and interconnectedness that transcends the political borders humans impose upon the natural world.
 

On stage, these ideas become visceral and communal. Performing with one-man-band Sammy Duke and Jamaican percussionist Gerima Harvey, Brilla creates vibrant performances where voice, guitar, percussion and improvisation invite audiences into a collective experience of movement and connection. Her performances have taken her to festivals and stages across South America, Australia, Asia, Europe and North America, including WOMAD, Folk Alliance International, NXNE and Iceland Airwaves.
 

Brilla’s creative reach includes collaborations with artists including The Black Eyed Peas, Bedouin Soundclash, Digging Roots, No Doubt, Paula Sofia and three-time Grammy-winning mastering engineer Emily Lazar. In 2013, she became one of the first self-produced female artists to receive a JUNO Award nomination. She later received Producer of the Year at the 2018 Independent Music Awards for her album Rooted, with her music reaching audiences through film, television and radio internationally.

A 2022 Keychange Artist selected through the European Commission-supported initiative, Brilla is recognized for her leadership in advancing gender equity within music. She has taught music production at Berklee College of Music and served as a resident artist and guest lecturer at institutions including the School of Audio Engineering Australia and the University of Waterloo.
 

An LGBTQ+ artist and advocate for greater accessibility in the arts, Brilla approaches listening as both an artistic and spiritual practice: a way of paying attention to relationships that are often rendered invisible. Whether recording a river, listening to birds, composing for film, collaborating with a community or performing for thousands of people, her work asks how sound might reconnect us to ourselves, to one another, to our ancestors and to the natural world of which we are a part.