Laura Karpman

Composer Laura Karpman's imaginative, wide-ranging scores have navigated jazz, rousing orchestral fare, wistful chamber music, and more. After starting in television in the late '80s, she made her feature film debut with the 1995 romantic comedy Lover's Knot. She'd won her first Emmy by 2003, for the science-fiction series Odyssey 5, and she continued to find demand in the sci-fi and adventure sectors, including on TV (Steven Spielberg's Taken), video games (the EverQuest franchise), and film (2016's Paris Can Wait). In the meantime, she worked offscreen on compositions including Ask Your Mama, a multimedia opera whose 2009 premiere at Carnegie Hall featured Jessye Norman and the Roots. Karpman made her Marvel Universe debut with TV's What If…? (2021) and Ms. Marvel (2022) before scoring 2023's The Marvels. However, it was her inventive, piano-based, Thelonious Monk-informed score for that year's American Fiction that roped Karpman her first Oscar nomination.