A 2018 Emmy nominee for Outstanding Music Composition for a Series (Once Upon a Time), Cindy O’Connor is an accomplished composer and performer for film, television, and theater. She has been awarded several fellowships including the Sundance Lab for Feature Film Scoring, BMI Conducting Fellowship, and LAFCI Conducting Fellowship. Cindy spent her early years working for composer Mark Isham and arranging, orchestrating, and composing additional music for films such as Warrior, Dolphin Tale, The Mechanic, and Brian DePalma's The Black Dahlia. Her feature film scores include Forgiving the Franklins (Sundance) and the thriller Not Forgotten, starring Simon Baker. In television, Cindy spent seven seasons collaborating with Mark Isham and Michael Simon on the hit ABC series Once Upon a Time. Other TV credits include Once Upon a Time in Wonderland, the Starz series Crash and the NBC series The Black Donnellys.

Cindy began her career as a musical theater composer with All That He Was, winner of the Musical Theater Award in the Kennedy Center/ACTF Festival and published by Samuel French, with book and lyrics by Larry Todd Cousineau. Her other musical theater works include La Llorona/The Crying Woman (Off-Broadway), 40 is the New 15 (NoHo Arts Center), Powder Puff Pilots and the recent Chicago hit parody, Flies! The Musical (Pride Arts Center).

As a performer, Cindy spent four years touring as a keyboard player and singer with rock superstar Pat Benatar, and she has performed as a singer and choir director with Petra Haden for concerts at the Ford, the Getty, and David Byrne’s Meltdown Festival in London. She has recently ventured into concert music, conducting the world premiere of her piece, “Archangel,” with the Hollywood Chamber Orchestra at the Wiltern in Los Angeles as part of The Future is Female concert, and conducting her piece “Sunrise” with the Moravian Philharmonic as part of the Hollywood Classics concert.