Music / Hildur Guðnadóttir

"To the girls, to the women, to the mothers, to the daughters who hear the music bubbling within, please speak up. We need to hear your voices."

— Hildur in her Best Original Score Academy Award acceptance speech for Joker

Hildur Ingveldardóttir Guðnadóttir (born 4 September 1982) is an Icelandic musician and composer.

Coming from a family of musicians, Hildur is a classically trained cellist as well as a singer, and she has collaborated with the likes of Pan Sonic, Throbbing Gristle, Múm, Stórsveit Nix Noltes, Animal Collective and Sunn O))) on albums and/or concerts.

She has also composed or performed music for films and television series since 2011, which is how she has gained the lion's share of her international recognition. Her scoring work on Joker and Chernobyl were particularly acclaimed and popular; the latter won her a Primetime Emmy, BAFTA and Grammy, and the former won her a BAFTA, Golden Globe, Grammy, and Oscar. With her Joker accolades, she is the first solo female composer to win an Oscar, Golden Globe and BAFTA in the original music/score categories^note Lisa Gerrard previously won a Golden Globe but shared hers with Hans Zimmer for Gladiator; Hildur is also specifically the first female winner of the Oscar for Best Original Score, following the merging of the Original Dramatic Score and Original Musical or Comedy Score categories in 2000 and the first person from Iceland to win an Oscar.

Hildur was also friends and collaborated with a fellow Icelandic musician and composer, the late Jóhann Jóhannsson, on films of Denis Villeneuve.

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Her solo albums include:

• Mount A (2006)
• Without Sinking (2009)
• Leyfðu Ljósinu (2012)
• Saman (2014)

Notable soundtracks of hers include:

• The Bleeding House (2011, composed)
• The Revenant (2015, solo cello)
• Sicario (2015, solo cello)
  • Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018, composed)
• Trapped (2015-2019, composed with Jóhann Jóhannsson)
• Arrival (2016, solo cello)
• Journey's End (2017, composed with Natalie Holt)
• Mary Magdalene (2018, composed in 2017 with Jóhann Jóhannsson)
• Chernobyl (2019, composed) — Emmy Award ^note Outstanding Music Composition for a Limited Series, Grammy Award ^note  Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media
• Joker (2019, composed) — Golden Globe Award ^note Best Original Score, BAFTA ^note Best Original Score, Academy Award ^note Best Original Score, Grammy Award ^note Best Score Soundtrack For Visual Media
  • Joker: Folie à Deux (2024, composed)
• Battlefield 2042 (2021, composed with Sam Slater)
• Tár (2022, composed)
• A Haunting in Venice (2023, composed)

Tropes & Trivia in her works:

• Everything Is an Instrument: She actually put a hazmat suit on, went into the decommissioned Ignalina nuclear power plant in Lithuania that would be used to film Chernobyl, and recorded sounds there, including pumps, reactors and turbines. She then arranged them alongside classical instruments into a haunting soundtrack for the series.

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