Jeff Danna

Danna was born in Burlington, Ontario. A reluctant piano student at age eight, he found solace in the guitar at age eleven and began playing professionally at fifteen until a hand injury at age 21 curtailed his performance career. He subsequently began composing for films and moved to Los Angeles to continue working.[3]

Danna has created scores for a long and varied list of films. His credits include such diverse projects as the hit film adaptations of the video game/action franchises Resident Evil: Apocalypse, Silent Hill and Silent Hill: Revelation; the Ryan Gosling-Anthony Hopkins legal drama Fracture; The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus and Tideland, both directed by Terry Gilliam; Lakeview Terrace, directed by Neil LaBute; a series of films for director Brett Morgen, including The Kid Stays in The Picture, Chicago 10, and the Kurt Cobain biopic Montage of Heck; Closing the Ring for director Richard Attenborough; and the cult classic The Boondock Saints, among others.[4]

Additionally, his collaborative orchestral Celtic albums with his brother, composer Mychael Danna, have enjoyed worldwide success and placed in the Top Ten on the Billboard chart in the United States.[5]

For television, Jeff and Mychael Danna wrote the original music for the FX series Tyrant, which earned them both Emmy nominations in the categories of Outstanding Music Composition for a Series (Original Dramatic Score) and Outstanding Original Main Title Theme Music in 2015.[6] They were previously Emmy-nominated for Camelot in 2011.[7]

In 2015, Jeff and Mychael Danna worked on the score for The Good Dinosaur and received an Annie nomination for Outstanding Achievement, Music in an Animated Feature Production.[8]

Jeff and Mychael Danna also wrote the original score for the animated film Storks, which was released in theatres in September 2016, [9] and for Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, directed by Ang Lee which opened in November 2016.[10]

In 2017, Jeff and Mychael wrote the original score for the animated film The Breadwinner, which had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and was released in theaters in November 2017. The Breadwinner was nominated for an Annie Award for best Animated Film Score, and won the Canadian Screen Award for Film Score Of The Year.[11] For television in 2017, Jeff and Mychael wrote the music for Alias Grace for Netflix, which also garnered a nomination for a Canadian Screen Award.[12]

Jeff Danna composed the score for on Guillermo del Toro's DreamWorks animated project 3Below: Tales of Arcadia in 2018.[13]

In 2020, Jeff and Mychael Danna completed their second film score for Pixar, Dan Scanlon's Onward.[14]

• Official website
• Jeff Danna at IMDb
• Jeff Danna's channel on YouTube