Ciara Elwis
Ciara is an Emmy award-winning music supervisor who works across film and television. She is best known for her work on Sharon Horgan’s Bad Sisters (for which she was nominated for a Guild of Music Supervisors’ and Hollywood Music and Media award), Ricky Gervais’s After Life and Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You. The latter, as well as gaining her an Emmy award, led to features in the NY Times, the LA Times, and Billboard discussing the huge impact of the soundtrack – the LA Times stating ‘The secret weapon behind ‘I May Destroy You’s greatness? The coolest music on TV’. In 2022, she was named as one of Forbes’ 30 under 30 in the Entertainment category.
Selected Credits
Having cut her ‘supervision teeth’ assisting on the critically acclaimed Sex Education (Ch4/Netflix) and The End of the F***ing World (Netflix), Ciara has since music supervised over 300 episodes of television including Aisling Bea’s BAFTA-winning This Way Up (Ch4/Hulu) and Clerkenwell’s BAFTA-nominated Somewhere Boy (Ch4/Hulu). Her feature film work includes David Yates’ Pain Hustlers (Netflix), Simon Pegg’s Slaughterhouse Rulez (Sony Pictures), all three films from Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir trilogy (starring Tilda Swinton for A24) and Ng Choon Ping and Sam Freeman’s award-winning indie feature Femme, for which she received a BIFA (British Independent Film Awards) nomination for her music supervision work.
A classically trained musician, with a first-class degree in Music from Edinburgh University (where her exhaustive knowledge of contemporary music earnt her the coveted position of campus brand manager for Spotify), Ciara is adept at working across all genres and eras, and with composers of all backgrounds and styles. Her success working alongside renowned artists on everything from original songs to assisting their transition into scoring has made artist collaborations a common theme across her projects, with Charli XCX (Nasty Cherry), PJ Harvey (Bad Sisters), Laura Mvula (Everything Now), Michael Kiwanuka (Convergence) and Norman Cook aka Fatboy Slim (Ibiza: The Silent Movie) among previous collaborators. Most recently, she was a producer on a bespoke covers album for Amazon’s critical hit My Lady Jane, showcasing some of the best new British talent including Griff, CHINCHILLA and Poppy Ajudha.
Ciara is comfortable working at all stages of production, from providing insights during script development to coordinating music department hires to rights clearances and licensing. Best known for her uniquely creative approach to building soundtracks, she also has a wealth of experience in period-specific research and on-set supervision of everything from cast performances to jazz quartets (Last Letter from Your Lover) to ‘Tudor Rock’ bands (My Lady Jane).
Upcoming projects include The Shallow Tale of a Writer who Decided to Write about a Serial Killer (directed by the two-time Sundance ‘Grand Jury Prize’ winner Tolga Karaçelik), which premiered at Tribeca Film Festival, NBCU’s Surviving Earth and Season 2 of Bad Sisters for Apple TV+.