Yannis Kyriakides was born in Limassol, Cyprus in 1969, emigrated to Britain in 1975 and has been living in the Netherlands since 1992. He studied musicology at York University, and later composition with Louis Andriessen and Dick Raaijmakers. He currently lives is Amsterdam with his wife and two sons.

As a composer and sound artist he looks for ways of creating new forms and hybrids of media that problematize the act of listening. The question as to what music is actually communicating is a recurring theme in his work and he is often drawn to the relation between perception, emotion and language and how that defines our experience of sound. In the last years his work has been exploring different relations between words and music, both in concert compositions and installations through the use of systems of encoding information into sound, synthesizing voices and projecting text to music. The latter work has led to about 20 music text films that play on the idea of imagined or inner voice.

Yannis has written over a hundred compositions, comprising mostly of music theatre, multimedia and electroacoustic works for chamber groups and large ensembles.