Christopher (Chris) Lutsker is a New York-based award-winning composer, sound designer, copyist, and multi-instrumentalist (primarily classical piano/jazz bass) for films, video games, and advertising. He believes that the narrative of a given piece of media is the guiding principle for scoring decisions and instinctually composes music in the genre or style that would best serve the given media. Chris has contributed music, dialogue editing, and related audio work to films that have featured at International Puerto Rican Heritage Film Festival, New York Independent Art Film Fest, Our Vision Caribbean and Latino Film Festival, The Female Eye Film Festival, T.H.E. Film Festival, and Red Nation International Film Festival. In Spring 2025, Chris scored the animated short What a Flop! which received the Marion Carter Green Award, an endowed prize given annually by the National Board of Review to a short film that exhibits noteworthy use of musical elements. It additionally earned ‘Best Picture’ at the New York Movie Awards in July 2025 and featured at the East Village New York Film Festival, New York Short Animation Festival, Spark of Madness Film Festival, ASIFA-East Animation Festival, and Jersey Shore Film Festival.

Chris is a co-founder and director of Waves & Staves, an audio (post-)production team that handles music, audio supervision, sound design, re-recording mixing and mastering, foley, and dialogue editing, as well as ADR recording, production sound mixing, and boom operations for films, and middleware implementation for video games.

Most of Chris’ compositions are orchestra-based and include elements of synthetic textures and/or sound design. He is most familiar with writing for classical orchestra, piano, pop, jazz, EDM, and rock, but usually produces a combination of all of these influences.

In Fall 2025, Chris taught a Beginner Screen Scoring course for student groups as an adjunct lecturer at New York University.

As a Ukrainian-American, Chris also reflects Ukrainian culture through melody and lyrics within his contemporary classical works. In 2024, he composed an art song O My Thoughts, My Heartfelt Thoughts based on the namesake poem by Taras Shevchenko (Тарас Шевченко), sung live by Aaron Humble, and plans to set a collection of Ukrainian poetry to music.

Chris’ first public involvement in music for media occurred in 2013, when he published solo piano arrangements of pop songs on Noteflight under the handle “abcdrix” that garnered thousands of views. Since 2021, his music has been recorded and performed by multiple orchestras and ensembles, including the Moscow Symphony Orchestra, Budapest Symphony Orchestra, NYU Orchestra, Brooklyn College Conservatory, ACES Educational Center for the Arts, and the Greater Connecticut Youth Orchestras.