Bulgarian-born pianist and film composer Mario Grigorov wrote the score for 2009 film Precious

Bulgarian-born pianist and film composer Mario Grigorov’s life has always been about music. Grigorov spent most of his life studying a range of musical forms including jazz, classical and world, before composing the score for Lee Daniels’ 2009 film Precious, based on the novel Push by Sapphire (Knopf, 1996). This marks Grigorov’s third collaboration with Daniels; the two also collaborated on Tennessee (2008)and Shadowboxer (2005). Precious, the 2009 New York Film Festival centerpiece and current Lee Daniels sensation, is the story of the ultimate outsider, her struggle to survive and will to overcome. As someone with an acute sense of what it’s like not to belong, Grigorov found that the film resonated with him almost immediately.
A speaker of five languages, he lived in four countries and under three types of government before the age of 18: communist, Islamic and democratic. “I don’t speak a single language without an accent,” says Grigorov.
The son of a concert pianist and trumpeter, Grigorov was born in Sophia, Bulgaria, in 1963. At age five, he became the youngest student ever admitted to the Sophia Conservatory. His life has taken him all over the map, both musically and geographically.