Hildur Guðnadóttir

Icelandic composer and cellist Hildur Guðnadóttir (born September 4, 1982) has become one of the most decorated and influential voices in contemporary film scoring, known for her haunting, minimalist soundscapes. Raised in a musical family in Reykjavík, she began playing the cello at age five and later studied composition and new media in Iceland and Berlin. Before her mainstream breakthrough, she was a prominent figure in the experimental and avant-garde scenes, collaborating with artists like Jóhann Jóhannsson, múm, and Sunn O))). She achieved historic international acclaim in 2019, winning an Academy Award, a BAFTA, and a Golden Globe for the film Joker, while also earning an Emmy and a Grammy for her visceral score for the HBO miniseries Chernobyl. As the first solo woman to win many of these top honors, Guðnadóttir continues to redefine the boundaries of visual media music with recent scores for TÁR (2022) and Women Talking (2022), maintaining her signature focus on the evocative power of her primary instrument, the cello.