Haralabos [Harry] Stafylakis
Composer | Producer | Guitarist | Educator
Composer | Producer | Guitarist | Educator
New York City-based, JUNO-nominated composer Haralabos [Harry] Stafylakis hails from Montreal. "Dreamy yet rhythmic" (NY Times), with a “terrible luminosity” and “ferociously expressive” (Times Colonist), his concert music is “an amalgamation of the classical music tradition and the soul and grime of heavy metal” (I Care If You Listen), “favoring doomsday chords and jackhammer rhythms” (The New Yorker).
Stafylakis has collaborated with artists and ensembles including Dame Evelyn Glennie, Roomful of Teeth, JACK Quartet, and orchestras around the world. Between 2016–2026, he was the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra's Composer-in-Residence and Curator of the Winnipeg New Music Festival.
He has collaborated with progressive metal pioneers Animals As Leaders on the adaptation of their music for metal band & orchestra. Hard Rubber Orchestra’s 2022 album Iguana earned Stafylakis a JUNO nomination for his metal–big band fusion composition Source Code. CC Duo & collectif 9’s 2025 album Re/String earned Stafylakis a third JUNO nomination for his double guitar concerto To wake and find the world still burning.
His 2023 album Calibrating Friction (New Amsterdam Records) has garnered recognition from progressive metal/rock and classical media alike for its deeply integrated fusion of metal and classical idioms and was nominated for the 2024 JUNO Awards’ Instrumental Album of the Year.
In fall 2026, Stafylakis releases the collaborative prog metal & chamber music EP dontwaitforme with vocalist-composer Courtney Swain, featuring members of Bent Knee and ShoutHouse.
Recognitions include the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Charles Ives Fellowship, ASCAP’s Leonard Bernstein Award, and SOCAN’s Classical Composer of the Year Award. He is a founding member of the NYC composer collective ICEBERG New Music. Recordings of his works appear on New Amsterdam Records, Naxos, Analekta, Leaf Music, Contrastes, Redshift, and Sono Luminus.
Stafylakis teaches composition & production at SUNY Purchase in New York and serves on the faculty of the ICEBERG Institute in Orlando, Florida.
www.hstafylakis.com
current as of September 1, 2026