PERSPECTIVE — Even just a few decades ago, when Chanda Dancy was attending the University of Southern California Screen Scoring Program, the prospects for aspiring women film composers were grim. “There was just no hope for someone like me,” she said. “Maybe to be an assistant for a more successful composer, and when I say ‘more successful,’ I typically mean male composer.”
Now Dancy is among a small but growing group of women who have broken through and made names for themselves in the field. She was nominated for a 2024 Emmy Award for her work on the Paramount+ series Lawmen: Bass Reeves, and her music for the 2022 film Devotion was up for an Academy Award for best original score.
Despite success like hers, women comprised just seven percent of the composers who worked on the 250 highest-grossing films in 2025 — a decline of two percentage points from 2024, according to a San Diego State University study. The numbers go up as high as 15 percent in other realms, such as independent films and documentaries, but are still a long way from gender parity.
“It’s definitely a work in progress,” said Scottish composer Anna Meredith, a relative newcomer to the field. “There are many more visible and very exciting female film composers around and doing big projects, and that’s great to see. But there is clearly space for more.”
Dancy and Meredith, along with composers Germaine Franco, Hildur Guðnadóttir, and Rachel Portman, will be saluted July 24 during a Chicago Symphony Orchestra program at the Ravinia Festival that pays tribute to women in cinema — both on and off the screen — and celebrates the art of film composition. The program, On the Movies, is co-curated by Laura Karpman, a composer for movies, television, and video games who co-founded the Alliance for Women Film Composers in 2014, and Marin Alsop, Ravinia’s chief conductor and a longtime advocate for women in music.
Alsop and Karpman have been friends since they were budding professionals in New York in the 1980s, so it was hardly surprising when the two teamed up to organize this film-related program. As a key component, Alsop wanted to highlight some of today’s top women film composers, so they worked together to assemble the concert’s centerpiece, what they are calling The Female Lens Suite, a series of short film-score extracts from five such creators.
“That took some time and some figuring out, but I think it’s going to be absolutely fantastic,” Karpman said, “and it will be interesting to hear these women’s voices flowing together.”
The program opens with The Science of Scoring, in which Karpman will present a 10-minute “masterclass” on how the choice of music affects the way viewers interpret a movie. She will show the same non-dialogue scene from Orson Welles’ 1958 film noir Touch of Evil three times, each with a different musical overlay played by the CSO. Featured will be Bernard Herrmann’s “Scène d’amour” from Vertigo, Arturo Márquez’s Danzón No. 2, and the music by Henry Mancini that was actually featured in the Welles film. “So, you are looking at the same scene with three radically different scorings, so you will perceive what is going on in a non-dialogue scene very differently,” Karpman said.
Following performances of Natalie Holt’s “Hanging Out” from the Disney+ TV series Obi-Wan Kenobi and John Williams’ title theme from Star Wars, the concert culminates with the world premiere of Karpman’s Unsung: A Symphonic Suite for the Superhero Women of Classic Hollywood. The 18-minute Ravinia commission pays tribute to four female characters from well-known films who were defined by their relationships to their male counterparts and only got love themes. A good example is Varinia (Jean Simmons) in Spartacus (1960). “Even though she was super brave and heroic in her actions, she never had a hero’s theme, so it was my goal to write heroic themes for four women in film history who never got their due musically,” said Karpman.
In addition to Verinia, the other characters highlighted are Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) in Double Indemnity (1944), Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore) in Imitation of Life (1959), and Maid Marian (Olivia de Havilland) in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938).
The grande dame among the five women film composers being saluted is Rachel Portman, 65, who has written scores for more than 100 films and won an Academy Award for her work on the 1996 version of Emma. She will be represented in The Female Lens with a performance of the Main Titles from The Cider House Rules (1999), for which she was nominated for an Academy Award. She grew up attending a boys school that had just opened its doors to girls, so she didn’t give much thought at first to being a woman in what was a man’s world. “I just ignored it,” she said.
But Portman felt the pressure later when invited to write scores for major releases such as the 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate. “I do think there is a sort of silent feeling among women who write music for film that they have to extra-show how good they are at their job because there’s sort of a niggling thing: Can they really do it? It’s a residual thing. And I certainly felt that on Manchurian Candidate.”
“I try to look for projects that have the right fit for the way I write,” Meredith said. The CSO will perform an orchestral arrangement of Nautilus, which she originally wrote for her band. It has been used in the scores for several film projects, including a Lady Gaga documentary. “It’s a piece of mine that people keep seem to keep coming back to,” she said. “It’s got a kind of swagger to it, which I’m really proud of.”
Dancy grew up as a fan of film composers like John Williams and Gabriel Yared, so for her senior undergraduate compositional thesis, she decided to direct her own short film and score it. “I was like, hey, give it a try,” she said. Her work on that little project helped her win the BMI Carpenter Fellowship in Film Scoring that brought her to the University of Southern California in 2003-04. “And that’s really how it all started,” she said. She will be represented by the Main Titles from the 2023 miniseries Lawmen: Bass Reeves. She wrote the music even before she had a script for the project, examining photos and documentation about the real-life figure. She drew on music of the deputy marshal’s time — Antonín Dvořák’s New World Symphony as well as African American spirituals and Native American music.
One of the newer members of female film composing world is Meredith, who has a half dozen films and a television show to her credit. Bridging the worlds of acoustic and electronic music, she also writes music for classical ensembles, her own band, and theater. “People have been saying to me for years that my stuff would work in films,” she said. Her first foray into that world came when writer-director Bo Burnham invited her to write the score for Eighth Grade (2018). After her initial success with that project, she got more calls for film work and eventually hired an agent.
The Female Lens will also feature Guðnadóttir’s “Confessions” from A Haunting in Venice and Franco’s Encanto Suite.
The participation of women composers in Hollywood got a big boost with the rise of the #MeToo Movement, which took fire following the sexual-abuse allegations against producer Harvey Weinstein in 2017. Also helping was the explosion of streaming during the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of services like Netflix. “So, more product means more opportunity for diverse and previously underrepresented voices, so a lot of us, me included, got opportunities that we had never before,” Karpman said.
Where women were often relegated to independent films and documentaries before, Karpman suddenly found herself writing scores for big releases in the cinematic realm of Marvel Comics, and other women got similar breaks. “We were amassing credits that were not dismissable,” she said. “They were not sideline credits.”
All that progress filled her with considerable hope. But since that time, Karpman said, the door has closed a bit. There has been some retrenchment as some producers and directors have returned to their old habits of relying on men, and the industry at large has scaled back with fewer movies and television series being greenlighted. “I’m both optimistic and pessimistic simultaneously,” she said, “and I think that is the right place to be right now.”
