About

Stefanos Kemanetzis is a composer, arranger, orchestrator, cellist, and educator who writes music that refuses to stay in one lane—because the most interesting stories rarely do either. His projects range from musicals and operas to concert works and interdisciplinary performance pieces, often drawing on history, philosophy, literature, and the collaborative process of creating narrative art. A committed polystylist, he moves freely between musical traditions and genres, treating style not as a boundary but as another storytelling tool.

He was born in Thessaloniki, Greece, and started playing the cello at age six. As a teenager, performing with the youth orchestras he belonged to, he began writing original arrangements and re-orchestrating existing classical pieces for those same ensembles, adapting the music to whatever instrumentation was actually available so that they could perform them in concert.

Having earned a Diploma in Violoncello Performance from the State Conservatory of Thessaloniki, he went on to study Contemporary Music Composition at the University of Macedonia in Thessaloniki, earning his Bachelor’s under composer Giorgos Kyriakakis. During this period, he played cello in operettas staged by the National Theatre of Northern Greece and composed original music for student plays in collaboration with the Theatre Department of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, scoring productions of Chekhov, Aristophanes, Shelley, and Bond. Those two strands, performing and composing for the stage, converged in his final-year composition project: ATHANATOS!, a fully original 75-minute operetta for which he wrote the book, music, and lyrics, and which he also produced and conducted, coordinating a 25-person team of musicians, actors, designers, and technicians.

After graduating, he joined the Drama School of the National Theatre of Northern Greece, where he taught music and developed a holistic music curriculum designed to train actors to think across disciplines rather than within them. As part of that curriculum, he wrote a fully comprehensive music theory textbook, the kind he wished had existed when he was learning: all the substance, none of the filler, written for people who want to genuinely understand music, not just pass an exam. At the same time, he pursued his MSc in Music Sciences & Arts at the University of Macedonia under opera singer Dr. Angelica Cathariou, where his thesis, Music Composition in Interaction with Literature and Theatre: "A Sky Dripping with Stars", an Intermedial Performance Based on Works by Albert Camus, combined a research paper with a live music-theatre performance staged by his own students at the Drama School.

Stefanos’s instrumental music has been selected through open calls by the Thessaloniki State Symphony Orchestra and the Greek Composers' Union, and later performed in concert. He was also recruited by composer Giorgos Christianakis to arrange and orchestrate 32 theatrical songs for large orchestra. As a cellist, he performed with the Megaron Youth Symphony Orchestra and the Balkan Youth Symphony Orchestra, served as principal cellist of the ProMusica and Rotonda String Ensembles, and was a member of the JoveNata String Ensemble—alongside which he worked as a session musician across genres ranging from classical to rock to Greek and Balkan traditional music.

In 2024, he moved to New York to begin the Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program (Cycle 35) at NYU Tisch, and completed his MFA in May 2026. That same spring, a song he composed was selected to be performed at the New York City Center Community Day, and his chamber opera Love, George premiered at the New York Transit Museum. Developed through the AOP–NYU/Tisch Opera Lab and commissioned as one of twelve operas marking the 120th anniversary of the New York City subway system, the work tells the story of early 20th-century Greek laborers who helped build the subway tunnels through the letters they sent home.

During his final year at NYU Tisch, he began developing Strings, a new musical with bookwriter and lyricist Jenna Christine. Inspired by the Greek rebetiko movement, the idea began as a question: what does it take to make people sing in a country where singing the wrong song can get you killed? It grew from there into a story about an underground group of rebels, a stolen violin, and a revolution hidden inside music.

Stefanos is a member of the Dramatists Guild. His arrangements have been performed by orchestras in Greece, the United States, Sweden, Germany, Japan, and Australia. He still plays a lot of cello.