Aldo Shllaku

Aldo Shllaku is an Albanian-born film and television composer based in Los Angeles.

He was born in Elbasan, where his family — originally from Shkodër — had been resettled under the communist regime; his parents were theatre actors who were involved in founding the city's theatre. After attending the "Onufri" arts school in Elbasan, he left Albania together with his family in 1991, first for Greece and then for Canada. In Montréal he studied music composition at the Université de Montréal under Michel Longtin and took part in the Domaine Forget International Music Academy. He continued with postgraduate studies at the University of Southern California, completing the "Scoring for Motion Pictures and Television" program, where he received the Harry Warren Award. Early in his career he worked for Christopher Young, contributing to projects such as Spider-Man 3, Miss Congeniality 2 and The Grudge.

His credits include several collaborations with director Ryûhei Kitamura — the live-action Lupin the 3rd (2014), Downrange (2017) and The Doorman (2020) — as well as films directed or co-directed by George Gallo, among them The Poison Rose (2019), The Comeback Trail (2020), Vanquish (2021) and The Ritual Killer (2023). He also scored Luàna Bajrami's Kosovar drama The Hill Where Lionesses Roar (2021) and the segment "Mashit" of the horror anthology Nightmare Cinema (2018). His awards include five Gold Medals for Excellence from the Park City Film Music Festival and a Best Original Song award from the Manhattan Film Festival. He is a co-founder of the Albanian production company Aeternum Artworks, based in Tirana.