Laura Karpman

Biography

Laura Anne Karpman is an American composer whose work has included music for film, television, video games, theater, and the concert hall. She has won five Emmy Awards for her work, as well as an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score. Karpman was trained at the Juilliard School, where she played jazz by day and performed in bars at night. Her scores include the television series Taken and The Living Edens, and the video game EverQuest II.

Early life and education

Karpman was born in Los Angeles and grew up singing opera and jazz. Her mother, a painter and sculptor, wanted her to grow up to be a composer and surrounded Karpman with music even before she was born. Karpman began her first compositions at the age of 7.
She worked with John Harbison at the Tanglewood Music Center, and attended Aspen Music School and the Ecole des Arts Americaines. At the University of Michigan, she graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Music degree studying with William Bolcom and Leslie Bassett. She received both her Doctorate and Master's Degree in Music Composition at the Juilliard School, where her principal teacher was Milton Babbitt. At Juilliard, Karpman also received mentorship from Nadia Boulanger.

Career

Compositions by Karpman have been commissioned by Tonya Pinkins, Los Angeles Opera, American Composers Orchestra, Czech Philharmonic, the Juilliard Choral Union, Pacific Serenades, and percussionist Evelyn Glennie. They have been performed internationally. Karpman's theater catalog includes three musicals for Los Angeles's "A Noise Within" theater company, as well as underscores for dozens of classic plays. Among her media music credits are Steven Spielberg's Emmy-winning, 20-hour TV miniseries, Taken; and PBS's series The Living Edens (for which she received nine Emmy nominations). She has scored numerous films, television programs and video games (including music for supplemental Halo 3 materials and her award-winning score for EverQuest II).
She has held a residency at Sony Online Entertainment. Karpman received an Annie Award nomination for A Monkey's Tale, a short film commissioned by the Chinese government, which later premiered in the US and was performed by the Detroit Symphony.
Karpman's Grammy-winning Ask Your Mama premiered at Carnegie Hall on March 16, 2009, with performances by Jessye Norman, Cassandra Wilson, The Roots, and the Orchestra of St. Luke's conducted by George Manahan. With Langston Hughes's epic poem for a libretto, Karpman also took passages from Louis Armstrong, Big Maybelle, Pigmeat Markham and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, integrated with projected images by Rico Gatson and additional archival video, as well as Hughes's own poetry. Ask Your Mama was released by Avie Records in July 2016. Later, Karpman created "The 110 Project", an opera work commissioned by the L.A. Opera as a homage to the city's first freeway, I-110, as seen through four characters from 1940-2010, the lifespan of the freeway.
In 2014, Karpman co-founded the Alliance for Women Film Composers with Lolita Ritmanis and Miriam Cutler. The organization provides visibility and advocacy for women composers. In 2016, Karpman became the first woman elected to the music branch of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Board of Governors.
Karpman composed the score for the Marvel Studios animated anthology series What If...? in 2021, the streaming series Ms. Marvel in 2022 and the score for the superhero film The Marvels in 2023. She composed the score for the 2023 film American Fiction, for which she received her first Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score.
In 2026, Karpman composed the score for Give Me the Ball!, a documentary about the life and legacy of Billie Jean King.

Personal life

Karpman is married to composer Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum, a fellow Milton Babbitt student. They have one son and live in Playa del Rey, California, in a duplex with an ocean view and a built-in studio.
Karpman is known for a signature look: she wears two pairs of glasses, one pair on her face, and the other on her head. She has a self-described lifelong obsession for drama, including soap opera, classical operas, and plays.

Articles and interviews

"Settling the Score"
"Ode to Joystick"
"Viewpoint"