Nicholas Britell
Composer Nicholas Britell was honored as an Ambassador of the Society of Composers & Lyricists at the SCL New York Holiday Party on December 6th, 2022 at The Cutting Room in New York City.
Nicholas Britell is a three-time Academy Award-nominated, Grammy-nominated, and Emmy-winning composer, pianist, and producer who is known for his critically-acclaimed scores, including those for Adam McKay’s 2021 Don’t Look Up, Barry Jenkins’ 2018 If Beale Street Could Talk, and Jenkins’ 2017 Academy Award Best Picture winner Moonlight. Britell received Academy Award nominations for those three films as well as BAFTA and Critics Choice nominations for Don’t Look Up and If Beale Street Could Talk. He received Golden Globe and Critics’ Choice nominations as well as the 2016 Hollywood Music in Media Award for Best Original Score (Dramatic Feature) for Moonlight. The year prior, he wrote the score for Adam McKay’s The Big Short, which marked the start of his collaboration with the Academy Award-winning writer-director-producer. In 2018, he wrote the score for McKay’s Vice, starring Christian Bale and Amy Adams. Britell has the distinction of winning Film Composer of the Year, Television Composer of the Year, and Discovery of the Year, as well as winning Best Original Song Written for a Film at the World Soundtrack Awards, and an SCL award for Outstanding Original Song for a Comedy for “Just Look Up” on behalf of Don’t Look Up all within the past 5 years. Britell’s latest film project is She Said for Universal Pictures, the score of which he co-produced with his wife, cellist Caitlin Sullivan. Britell’s upcoming film projects include Barry Jenkins’The Lion King for Walt Disney Pictures.
Britell is also the mastermind behind some of TV’s most beloved scores, notably the Succession Main Title Theme, which won him an Emmy and was dubbed “the definitive TV Theme of the 21st Century” by The Guardian. He received a Grammy nomination in 2022 for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media. Continuing his work on the show over the following seasons, Britell received Emmy nominations for both his Season 2 and 3 scores and is currently scoring Season 4. Other television scores he has composed include his Emmy-nominated score for Barry Jenkins’ The Underground Railroad and the score for HBO’s Winning Time which he co-composed with Grammy-winning artist Robert Glasper. His critically acclaimed score for Lucasfilm’s Star Wars series Andor premiered September 2022 which earned him an SCL nomination for Outstanding Score for a Television Production.
In addition to his work as a San Francisco Symphony Collaborative Partner, Britell is a Steinway Artist, a Creative Associate of the Juilliard School, and an honors and Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard University.