Born and raised in Aguascalientes, Mexico, Luis Ramirez (b. 1992) is a Mexican-Canadian composer, pianist, and conductor known for vibrant, rhythmically intricate textures and evocative soundscapes that blend Mexican folklore with cinematic storytelling. Praised by Jocelyn Morlock for his “great talent and imaginative, unique voice,” he has had his works performed by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de México, Calgary Philharmonic, Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra, and Orchestre Classique de Montréal. His music has premiered at Festival Cervantino, Ottawa Chamberfest, Music on Main, Prisms Festival, the Emerald Coast Chamber Music Festival, Casalmaggiore, and Class Axe.
Ramirez was a NextGen Composer with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, which commissioned Mi Piñata and Picante, and a Composer Fellow with the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra, for which he wrote Koatl. His string quartet Leaven earned him a 2026 Western Canadian Music Awards nomination for Composer of the Year. He has also received first prize in the SOCAN Sir Ernest MacMillan Award and the CMC Prairie Region Emerging Composer Competition for Chido, first prize in the Morelia Orchestral Composition Competition, first prize in the Arts & Letters Club of Toronto Emerging Canadian Composers Competition for Azure, an honourable mention from the Barlow Endowment for Singularity, and third prize in the SOCAN Solo & Duet Awards for Prompt. Recent commissions include works for Duo Concertante, Brandon Chamber Players, The Happenstancers, and Trio Kalysta. His music has been recorded on ATMA Classique by the Orchestre Classique de Montréal, by the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra under Dinuk Wijeratne, by the ATLYS String Quartet, and by guitarist Daniel Ramjattan.
Also a published scholar, Ramirez explores video editing as an extended compositional technique in his doctoral research. His peer-reviewed writing appears in Innovation in Music: Future Opportunities (Routledge) and in the proceedings of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, and he has presented papers in London, Lisbon, and Daegu, South Korea, receiving the Canadian University Music Society’s George Proctor Prize for original research. He is completing his Ph.D. in composition under Randolph Peters at York University as a SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier doctoral scholar, and is a graduate of Brandon University, where he studied piano with Alexander Tselyakov and composition with Dr. Patrick Carrabré. Important mentors also include Dinuk Wijeratne, Enrico Chapela, Barak Schmool, and Julián Peralta. He serves on the board of GroundSwell in Winnipeg and has sat on juries for the JUNO Awards and MusicNL. Based in Manitoba, he joined Brandon University as Assistant Professor of Music Theory and conductor of the Brandon University Orchestra.