Hildur Guðnadóttir
Hildur Ingveldardóttir Guðnadóttir (born 4 September 1982) is an Icelandic musician and composer. A classically trained cellist, she has played and recorded with the bands Pan Sonic, Throbbing Gristle, Múm and Stórsveit Nix Noltes, and has toured with Animal Collective and Sunn O))). She has also produced solo works. Hildur has gained international recognition for her film and television scores, including for the action thriller film "" (2018), and the HBO miniseries "Chernobyl" (2019), the latter of which won her a Primetime Emmy Award, a BAFTA Award and a Grammy Award. For her score to the 2019 tragedy film  Joker, Hildur won the Academy Award for Best Original Score. She also won the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score, and the BAFTA Award for Best Original Music, making her the first solo female composer to win in both. Personal life. Hildur was born in 1982 in Reykjavík, Iceland, and was raised in Hafnarfjörður. She comes from a family of musicians — her father, Guðni Franzson, is a composer, clarinet player and teacher. Her mother, Ingveldur Guðrún Ólafsdóttir, is an opera singer, and her brother is Þórarinn Guðnason from the band Agent Fresco. Hildur began playing cello at the age  of five and performed her first professional gig at 10 alongside her mother at a restaurant. She attended the Reykjavik Music Academy and went on to study composition and new media at the Iceland Academy of the Arts and the Berlin University of the Arts. Hildur lives in Berlin with her son (born 2012). She is married to Sam Slater, an English composer, music producer and sound artist, with whom she collaborated on multiple projects including "Chernobyl " and "Joker". She also used to share a studio with fellow composers Dustin O'Halloran and the late Jóhann Jóhannsson, the latter being a  frequent collaborator, while residing in Berlin. Career. In 2006, Hildur released a solo album, "Mount A", under the name Lost In Hildurness, on which she attempted to "involve other people as little as [she] could." It was recorded in New York City and Hólar in the north of Iceland. 2009 saw the release of her second solo album, "Without Sinking", on the U.K.-based audio-visual label, Touch. As well as playing cello and halldorophone, Hildur also sings and arranges choral music, once arranging a choir for performances by Throbbing Gristle in Austria and London. As a composer she has written  a score for the play "Sumardagur" ("Summer Day") performed at Iceland's National Theatre. She has also written the score for the Danish film "Kapringen " (2012), Garth Davis' 2018 film "Mary Magdalene" (in collaboration with Jóhann Jóhannsson), Stefano Sollima's "" (2018). Her work on the 2019 "Chernobyl" miniseries was met with critical acclaim, and won her a Primetime Emmy Award and the Grammy Award for "Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media". She composed the score to the 2019 film "Joker", starring Joaquin Phoenix and Robert de Niro, and directed by Todd Phillips, for which she won the Premio Soundtrack Stars  Award at the 76th Venice International Film Festival and the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score, becoming the first solo woman composer to win in this category at the Golden Globe Awards. At the 92nd Academy Awards, Hildur won the award for Best Original Score, becoming the first woman to win since the Original Dramatic Score and Original Musical or Comedy Score categories were combined in 2000. She is the first Icelander to win an Oscar. In 2021, Guðnadóttir collaborated with her husband, Sam Slater, on the video-game score for "Battlefield 2042" by DICE (company) and EA Games . The soundtrack was released 10 September 2021.