Hildur Guðnadóttir is an Icelandic composer and cellist whose music for the screen grows from sustained, slowly evolving tones. Before her breakthrough as a film composer she played in the ensemble that recorded Jóhann Jóhannsson’s low, pressurised score for Sicario.
Her score for HBO’s Chernobyl (2019) was built from field recordings made inside the decommissioned Ignalina nuclear power plant in Lithuania, with her processed voice the only traditional instrument; it won an Emmy and a Grammy. Her dark, cello-led score for Todd Phillips’s Joker then brought the Golden Globe, where she became the first woman to win the award for score on her own, the BAFTA and, in 2020, the Academy Award for Best Original Score, completing four major prizes in under five months. In her Oscar speech she urged girls and women who hear music within them to speak up.