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Hildur Guðnadóttir: From Cellist to Joker's Oscar-Winning Score

Profile · ~15 min

Overview

Hildur Guðnadóttir (born 1982) trained as a cellist at the Reykjavík College of Music and the Iceland Academy of the Arts before building a career blending classical performance, experimental composition, and film scoring, winning the Academy Award for Best Original Score for Joker (2019), becoming the first woman to win the award since it was consolidated into a single category two decades earlier.

What You Need

Where to Start: Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018, co-composer), Chernobyl (2019, HBO), Joker (2019)

Steps

Formal cello and composition training in Iceland

Guðnadóttir studied cello and composition at the Reykjavík College of Music and the Iceland Academy of the Arts, part of Iceland's small but internationally influential contemporary classical and experimental music scene, before further study in composition in Berlin, building a formal technical foundation in both performance and composition.

Building a career as a performer and experimental composer

Guðnadóttir spent years working as a cellist and composer within Iceland's and Berlin's experimental and contemporary classical music circles, releasing solo albums and collaborating with other musicians before her film and television scoring career developed, giving her compositional voice a distinctive, texturally unconventional character before Hollywood ever hired her.

Television breakthrough with Chernobyl

Guðnadóttir's score for HBO's Chernobyl (2019), built partly from recordings made inside a decommissioned Lithuanian nuclear power plant, brought her widespread critical acclaim and an Emmy Award, establishing her reputation for physically sourced, texturally unconventional scoring well before her film work with Joker.

Joker and historic Academy Award recognition

Guðnadóttir's score for Joker (2019), built around a solo cello and unusually dark, physically discomforting texture, won her the Academy Award for Best Original Score, making her the first woman to win the award since the Academy consolidated its scoring categories into one in 2000, and only the fourth woman ever to win in the category's full history.

Pro Tips

Sourcing unconventional physical and environmental sounds directly into a score, including recordings made inside a decommissioned nuclear power plant for Chernobyl, rather than relying solely on conventional orchestral instrumentation.
Composing music before or during filming rather than after, a workflow she has described using on Joker, allowing the actor's physical performance to respond directly to the score rather than the reverse.
A cello-centered, texturally dark compositional voice carried from her experimental solo album work directly into major studio film and television scoring.
Building sustained collaborative relationships across film and television (multiple projects with director Todd Phillips and composer credits alongside Jóhann Jóhannsson) that extend her distinctive sound across mediums.

Knowledge Base

What You'll Learn

Guðnadóttir's formal Icelandic classical training, combined with years in experimental composition before her scoring career, produced a historically significant Academy Award win and one of the most texturally distinctive scoring voices in contemporary film and television.

Awards & Recognition

Guðnadóttir won the Academy Award for Best Original Score for Joker (2019), becoming the first woman to win the award since the Academy consolidated its scoring categories in 2000, alongside an Emmy Award for Chernobyl (2019) and a Golden Globe for Joker in the same award season.

Why Guðnadóttir Still Matters

Her historic Oscar win, following decades without a female winner in the modern single scoring category, drew significant attention to the continued underrepresentation of women in film composing, while her unconventional, physically sourced textures expanded what a contemporary film score could sound like.

Where This Fits

This guide covers one specific part of scoring for picture. The wider picture, spotting, tempo and sync, orchestrating around dialogue, and delivering stems a dub stage can use, is in Scoring for Picture: A Composer's Workflow, which frames the discipline as a whole and links out to the detailed guides underneath it, including this one. If you are starting from scratch rather than solving a specific problem, read that first and come back here.

FAQ

Q: Was Hildur Guðnadóttir really the first woman to win the Best Original Score Oscar in decades?
A: Yes. She was the first woman to win since the Academy consolidated its multiple scoring categories into a single Best Original Score award in 2000, and only the fourth woman ever to win a film scoring Oscar across the award's full history, following earlier winners including Rachel Portman and Anne Dudley in the now-discontinued Best Original Musical or Comedy Score category.

Q: What is distinctive about how Hildur Guðnadóttir composes?
A: She frequently sources unconventional physical and environmental sounds directly into her scores, including recordings made inside a decommissioned nuclear power plant for Chernobyl, and has described composing some scores before or during filming so a performance can respond directly to the music.