Justin Hurwitz

In whatever direction he turns Justin Hurwitz will probably always be known for composing the award-winning music in the runaway success movie 'La La Land', on which he collaborated with his director friend Damien Chazelle and nominated for 14 Academy Awards.

The son of a writer and a ballet dancer, Hurwitz was raised in a musical family in Los Angeles, though they moved to Wisconsin when he was in his early teens. He was playing piano by the age of six and writing his own music by ten and fell in love with jazz after an uncle gave him an Oscar Peterson record. He studied classical music with Stefanie Jacob at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music in Milwaukee, but it was when he went to study at Harvard University that his future direction began to take form. Chazelle was his room-mate and the pair went on to form an indie pop band, Chester French, playing in clubs in the Boston area and collaborating on a student film that was eventually released in 2009 under the title 'Guy and Madeline On a Park Bench'.

Graduating from college they both moved to Los Angeles where Hurwitz found work as a screenwriter, writing comedy for sit-com 'The League' and one episode of 'The Simpsons'. With Chazelle writing and directing, Hurwitz scored the music for the 2014 film 'Whiplash', a low-budget story of an ambitious young drummer's conflicts with his aggressive tutor at a music conservatory, which won three Academy Awards and earned Hurwitz a Grammy nomination for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media. This laid the groundwork for the film 'La La Land', in which they decided to try and recreate the romanticism of the golden age of Hollywood musicals. They struggled to get funding but with Ryan Gosling playing a jazz pianist dreaming of opening his own club and Emma Stone as an aspiring actress, 'La La Land' captured the imagination of critics and public alike and it became something of a phenomenon, instantly establishing Hurwitz as a giant of film composition.