Utako Toyama

About Utako Toyama

Utako Toyama is a multi-award-winning composer and the founder of
SkyBridge and the Co-Founder of Songs for World Peace.
She received a scholarship to Berklee College of Music and
graduated cum laude with the Contemporary Music Composition and
Production major. By experiencing “music making her friends while
she made music with musicians from many countries”, she realized about universality
and diversity of humanity and music. She then started a global project band, SkyBridge
with the slogan of “We look different, we ALL smile the same”. She received the Martin
Luther King Artistry Award at Berklee.
After graduation, she received an exceptional talent visa in the US. She became the
first and only Japanese songwriter to receive multiple finalist awards at John Lesson
Songwriting Contest and contests such as SongStar and RAWA songs for social
change. She has been performing at well-respected events such as the Women
Musicians Network concert at Berklee Performance Center as the special Alumna, at
the Boston consul general’s house, Boston Japan Festival, Harvard University, and MIT
and conferences hosted by Massachusetts Peace Action and many others.
She received the UK exceptional talent visa and moved to London, the UK in 2019.
During the 2020 Corona disaster, she co-founded Songs for World Peace(SWP), a
global initiative for musicians around the globe to write and release songs for world
peace in their native languages. She collaborated with the Global Voices Film Festival,
a film festival organized by the UN Women SF Chapter and her composition "We
Declare Peace" was played at the festival. In 2022, she received the Hiroshima Award
in the Overseas Music category at the Hiroshima International Peace Culture Festival,
sponsored by the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Ministry of
Foreign Affairs, and Hiroshima Prefecture, in recognition of her peace activities.
She devotes her gifts of leadership and composing to promoting diversity, equality and
world peace through music and by collaborating with similar-minded organizations.
She has worked in the US, Japan, Kenya, Uganda and Croatia and performed with
fantastic musicians from over 47 countries, including Grammy-awarded musicians,
such as Mark Walker and Victor Wooten as SkyBridge. She has led musicians from
over 100 countries in total with SWP. She is currently exploring the possibilities of an
online global choir, working on an album for SkyBridge tour, organizing SWP, and
creating a singer-songwriter album as Utako Toyama, featuring singers from around the
world.