Celebrate International Women’s Day with this extraordinarily talented group of female film composers. Hear what happens when you combine the live musicians of Helix Collective with these creative powerhouse music creators.
Featuring the music of Dara Taylor (The Tender Bar), Sherri Chung (Riverdale, The Red Line), Amritha Vaz (Mira, Royal Detective), Anna Drubich (Barbarian), Heather McIntosh (Z for Zachariah, The L Word, Generation Q), and Emilie Bernstein (Orchestrator, Call of Duty: Black Ops).
Video: The Light of Day, The Littlest Things, Viva Maxine
As part of the performance, the composers will share their thoughts on composing for film and the challenges and rewards of writing for live performance.
Co-presented by Helix Collective and West Hollywood, the program will begin with a 20 minute documentary presented by the Russian Speaking Board of West Hollywood dedicated to women heroes in the West Hollywood community.
This program is supported in part by an arts grant from the City of West Hollywood. We’d also like to share a very special thank you to our 2023 season signature sponsor, Orange Tree Samples, season sponsor ASCAP and concert sponsor the Alliance for Women Film Composers.
The City of West Hollywood and Helix Collective present
International Women’s Day – Celebrating Women Composers in Hollywood
Sunday, March 5th, 12pm
Fiesta Hall, West Hollywood
Free Admission (No reservations required)
Free Parking in Plummer Park
ABOUT HELIX COLLECTIVE
Helix Collective are classical musicians busting out of the traditional mold. From crossover dance music, to storytelling, to film, television, and video game music, the Los Angeles-based ensemble takes the best of classical chamber music and makes it the life of the party.
Variety Magazine praised Helix Collective’s musical range moving from “moody urgency and edgy chamber-music sound” to the “sweetly romantic evoking wide-open spaces.”
Helix “has a little something for everyone: those who like their classics straight up, with a contemporary edge to it, or with populist appeal.” Called “dizzyingly virtuosic with exquisite musicianship and world-class range” by The Free Times and praised for “beyond-the-ordinary programming.”
Like the double helix, the ensemble is rearrangeable, flexible, and fuses the DNA of classical music into worlds where it’s never gone before.
ABOUT THE COMPOSERS
Sherri Chung
Sherri Chung is a composer for film and television and currently composes the scores for Riverdale (CW) and Blindspot (NBC). Her most recent show, The Red Line, produced by Greg Berlanti and Ava DuVernay, is a limited series which premiered on CBS and currently airs on CBS All Access.
Her latest Warner Bros. film, Nancy Drew and The Hidden Staircase was released March 2019 in theaters nationwide. Sherri’s compositional work includes both songs and scores for t.v., films, documentaries, commercials, musicals and music libraries. One of her recent films, The Other Side of Home was shortlisted for the 2017 Oscars for Best Short Documentary.
Emilie Bernstein
Emilie Adamson Bernstein is an orchestrator, composer and movement specialist. As an orchestrator she has worked most extensively with composer Elmer Bernstein, as well as with composers Christopher Lennertz, John Frizzell, Peter Bernstein and Shawn Murray. She has provided orchestrations on over 29 movies as well as being lead orchestrator on two Call of Duty campaigns, World At War in 2008 and Black Ops in 2010. In 2021 she teamed up with Peter Bernstein and together they are scoring projects for films and television, being honored in 2022 with an HMMA nomination for their first ever collaboration for the documentary Landis: Just Watch Me.
Anna Drubich
Anna Drubich is an award-winning film composer from Moscow. Anna discovered her love for music at an early age and began piano lessons at the age of 8. She studied at the Moscow Chopin Music College and earned her Bachelor and Master’s degrees at the Munich School for the Performing Arts in 2008.
Her diverse body of work includes live action features, animated features, television series, documentaries and plays and concert halls across the world. Anna has scored over 35 major film and TV projects from the US, Denmark, Germany, Russia, Spain and Egypt.
Her most recent film work includes the Russian period piece Odessa and a co-score with Oscar-nominated composer Marco Beltrami on the Guillermo Del Toro adaption Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Recently Anna completed work on horror-comedy Werewolves Within, Netflix’s hit feature Fear Street: 1994, the 2022 Sundane Audience award-winning documentary Navalny, and the wildly successful horror feature Barbarian starring Bill Skarsgard.
Heather McIntosh
Heather McIntosh is a composer whose credits include Compliance, Z for Zachariah and One Dollar directed by Craig Zobel, Faults and The Art of Self-Defense directed by Riley Stearns, Astra Taylor’s Examined Life and What is Democracy?, The Quarry directed by Scott Teems, the original score for Amy Scott’s documentaries Hal and Sheryl (about Hal Ashby and Sheryl Crow respectively), The L Word: Generation Q and Partner Track (both series co-composed with Allyson Newman) and Cat Person directed by Susanna Fogel, based on the 2017 New Yorker short story of the same name, which premieres at Sundance Film Festival 2023.
She is also an alumna of The Sundance Institute Music & Sound Design Labs at Skywalker Sound, a Sundance Institute Time Warner Foundation Fellow, and a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, The Recording Academy and the Television Academy.
Heather started her musical career playing with the bands of The Elephant 6 Collective, Gnarls Barkley, and Lil Wayne. She has recorded with Animal Collective, Norah Jones, and St. Vincent, and has performed on stage with a variety of artists, such as Bright Eyes, of Montreal, Cat Power and John C. Reilly and Friends. Following her touring days, she has been regularly composing music for film and television since 2011.
Dara Taylor
Dara Taylor has emerged as a fresh voice in the world of scoring music to picture as evidenced by her score to Amazon Studios film The Tender Bar, directed by Academy Award-winning filmmaker George Clooney and her co-score to the Lionsgate comedy Barb and Star Go To Vista Del Mar starring Kristen Wiig and Jamie Dornan. Her credits include the action crime drama Echo Boomers starring Michael Shannon, the Netflix series Bookmarks, the Netflix docuseries Trial By Media, the FX series Pride, and the Karen Allen-starred film Colewell, for which she won a 2019 Hollywood Music in Media award. Dara is a proud member of the Composers Diversity Collective, the Television Academy, Recording Academy, Society of Composers and Lyricists, Alliance of Women Film Composers, and Women in Media.
www.darataylor.com
Amritha Vaz
Amritha Vaz is the composer for Disney Junior’s animated series “Mira, Royal Detective” and has been nominated for an ASCAP Composer’s Choice Award, and two Annie Awards for her work on the series. Prior to scoring film and television projects, Amritha Vaz was a human rights attorney, so she’s very interested in helping tell stories with purpose. Beginning her writing journey with Academy Award winning composer Mychael Danna on “500 Days of Summer,” she became one of six composers selected for the 2016 Sundance Composer Lab. In addition to her work on Mira, Amritha recently scored an episode of the Emmy nominated AppleTV series “Home.” www.amrithavaz.com
en Composers in Hollywood
