Jonathan Beard

Jonathan Beard is an American orchestrator and composer for media and the concert stage. His credits include Us, The Handmaid’s Tale, Despicable Me 3, Star Wars: Battlefront II, and Wicked. Beard also works as an educator, and currently teaches at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. Background Beard finished Summerfield Waldorf School in Santa Rosa in 1999. He majored in musical composition at Stanford University, and received a master’s degree from UCLA. Other recent projects include his electroacoustic suite Ritual, his opera Cesare, Child of Night (OPERA UCLA premiere Fall 2021), the film scores to What Still Remains, Heavenquest, and Frank vs. God; and De tu puño y letra, an electronic video-sound collaboration with artist Suzanne Lacy. He has served on the composing teams for video games such as Star Wars: Battlefront I and II, and guest-composed for ABC’s Once Upon a Time. For the stage, Beard co-composed the oratorio The Passion of Anne Frank for the Los Angeles Master Chorale as part of their Voices Within residency, and his original theatre-score for Driving Miss Daisy received an NAACP Theatre Award nomination. As an orchestrator, Beard has collaborated with other compo