Laura Karpman

2024 Oscar nominated composer LAURA KARPMAN brings to her music feverish imagination, impeccable musicianship, complexity, versatility, unbridled joy, and fearlessness which push the boundaries of storytelling. The Emmy-award winning composer Karpman’s rigorous musical approach, coupled with conceptual and progressive uses of technology and recording, is that of a true 21st century American composer. Named one of the most important women in Hollywood by Variety Magazine, she is one of a handful of female composers with an active career in film and television, and one of only 12 woman to be nominated for an Oscar (for her original score to American Fiction) in the history of the awards in this category. Winning four Emmys and receiving an additional seven nominations, an Annie Award nomination and two GANG awards and a nomination for her video game music, her  concert music is widely performed in major venues internationally, and her lifelong obsession with jazz (which began with memorizing Ella Fitzgerald’s scat solos at age 11) is embedded in her uniquely creative work.

Recent and upcoming commissions and performances include the a children’s opera Wilde Tales for Glimmerglass Festival, and Hidden World of Girls with the Kitchen Sisters for the Cabrillo Festival, works for the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus and Pacific Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, her new opera with New York Times columnist Gail Collins, Balls, at Opera Parallèle, and most recently, the eclectic animated Marvel series What If? and acclaimed Ms. Marvel. Karpman’s ground-breaking, two-time Grammy-Award winning score for the multi-media evening ASK YOUR MAMA, featuring Jessye Norman, The Roots, jazz vocalists de’Adre Aziza, and George Manahan conducting, premiered to a sold-out house at Carnegie Hall and made its West Coast premiere, with Nnenna Freelon joining the cast, at the Hollywood Bowl and returned to New York’s famed Apollo Theater, and has traveled across the US.

Her concert works have been commissioned by Carnegie Hall, percussionist Evelyn Glennie, Los Angeles Opera, Tonya Pinkins, American Composers Orchestra, Czech Philharmonic, Juilliard Choral Union, among others, and performed by orchestras and ensembles internationally, including the Juilliard Chorus, and the Detroit, Richmond, Seattle, Houston, New York Youth, Tucson, San Jose Chamber, and Prague Symphonies. Her theater catalog includes three musicals for Los Angeles’s A Noise Within theater company as well as underscore for dozens of classic plays. She works with today’s most creative filmmakers, including Misha Green, Steven Spielberg, Kevin Feige, Alex Gibney, Kasi Lemmons, and Sophia Coppola. With Raphael Saadiq, she collaborated on the Emmy-nominated score to Lovecraft Country and the film Black Nativity. Her extensive media music credits also include the score to WGN hit TV series Underground, Steven Spielberg’s Emmy-winning 20-hour miniseries Taken, PBS’s acclaimed series The Living Edens, for which she received nine Emmy nominations, plus numerous films, television programs and video games, including music for Halo 3 and her award-winning score for Everquest II. Karpman received an Annie Award nomination for the short film “A Monkey’s Tale,” receiving its US premiere by the Detroit Symphony.

Karpman has received an Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and several ASCAP Foundation and Meet the Composer Grants, residencies at Tanglewood, where she studied with John Harbison, and The MacDowell Colony. Karpman was among the first composers selected as a Sundance Institute Film Scoring Fellow, where she worked with Dave Grusin, Robert Redford, and David Raksin. She attended the Aspen Music School and spent a life-changing summer studying with the legendary Nadia Boulanger at Ecoles d’Art Américaines de Fontainebleau. She received her Bachelor of Music from the University of Michigan, where she studied with William Bolcom and Leslie Bassett, and received both her Master’s and Doctoral degrees at The Juilliard School where she studied with Milton Babbitt, composing and studying the complexities of concert music by day, while playing jazz and scat singing in Manhattan clubs by night.

A member of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, she is currently a professor at USC Thornton, and has taught at UCLA, ran the first master’s degree film-scoring program at Berklee College of Music’s campus in Valencia, Spain, and has appeared as Guest Composer/Lecturer at the Juilliard School, University of Michigan, San Francisco Conservatory, Mills College, Emerson College, and many others. She is founder the Alliance for Women Film Composers and was the first woman governor in the music branch of the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences, is an advisor at the Sundance Institute, and serves on the Music Peer Group Executive Committee of The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

2024 Oscar nominated and Five-time Emmy-Award winning composer Laura Karpman creates powerful, imaginative scores that push the boundaries of storytelling. Her award-winning music, spanning film, television, theater, interactive media, and concert music, reflects an audaciously creative, fresh spirit. Nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Score for American Fiction, she is one of only 12 woman to be nominated in the history of the awards in this category.  Karpman’s concert music is widely performed, with recent commissions and performances at the Glimmerglass and Cabrillo Festivals, Pacific Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and her new opera with New York Times columnist Gail Collins Balls, at Opera Parallèle, and most recently, the eclectic animated Marvel series What If? and acclaimed Ms. Marvel. The recording of her Carnegie Hall-commissioned multimedia ASK YOUR MAMA won two Grammy awards. She works with today’s most creative filmmakers, including Misha Green, Steven Spielberg, Kevin Feige, Alex Gibney, Kasi Lemmons, and Sophia Coppola. With Raphael Saadiq, she collaborated on the Emmy-nominated score to Lovecraft Country and the film Black Nativity, She received her doctorate from The Juilliard School, where she studied with Milton Babbitt by day, and played jazz (a lifelong passion) and sang scat in clubs by night. Named one of the most important women in Hollywood by Variety, she founded the Alliance for Women Film Composers and was the first woman governor in the music branch of the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences, and subsequently elected to be the first female governor of the music branch. Karpman was an advisor for the Sundance Film Institute and is on the faculty of the USC Film Scoring Program.