Kathryn Bostic is a composer and artist known for her work on award-winning films, TV, and live theater, including scores for Clemency (2019) and the Emmy-nominated films Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir (2021) and Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am (2019). She also scored The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, which won the 2023 Peabody Award and is being honored at the "Television Academy Honors Awards”. Songwriter, pianist and vocalist, Bostic is the recipient of the Sundance Institute/Time Warner Fellowship, and Best Music in Film by the African American Film Critics Association. In 2016 she became the first female African American score composer to join the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.

Frank Lehman is Associate Professor of Music at Tufts University. His publications include Hollywood Harmony: Musical Wonder and the Sound of Cinema, the "Complete Catalogue of the Musical Themes of Star Wars," and articles in Music Theory Spectrum, Music Analysis, Music Theory Online, and more. He is active in the public musicology community and has had work featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education, NPR, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and The New Yorker. He is editor of the forthcoming Studying the Score: Music Analysis and Film (Routledge), and is currently writing a book on Star Wars music.

Julianne Grasso is an Assistant Professor of Music Theory at Florida State University. She specializes in analytical approaches to video game music and has presented this work at conferences including the annual meetings for SMT, AMS, and SCMS. Her most recent publications include essays in the Oxford Handbook of Public Music Theory (ed. J. Daniel Jenkins) and the Journal of Sound and Music in Games. When she’s not playing video games, she’s probably yapping about them on twitch.tv/bardicknowledge on Thursday evenings with the Ludomusicology Twitch Streamers. While Twitter still exists, you can find her there: @juliannegrasso.

Sarah Louden is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Music and Director of Music Theory and History at New York University Steinhardt. Her work integrates research in cognitive neuroscience and multisensory perception with a broad range of topics including multimedia and contemporary music analysis, music theory pedagogy, classroom accessibility, stage performance, and virtual reality. She is currently working on a three-year project, with grant support from NYU, to create a series of open-source course resources, anthologies, and lesson plans to reframe the music theory curriculum to promote under-represented composers, popular music, music from film and musicals, and traditions across the globe.

Táhirih Motazedian is an Assistant Professor of Music at Vassar College. Her book, Key Constellations: Interpreting Tonality in Film (October 2023, University of California Press) explores how key and pitch relationships in film soundtracks tell a story.  She has published (and forthcoming) articles and chapters on a range of topics, including Sergei Eisenstein’s production of Die Walküre, the “heartstring schema” in film and nineteenth-century music, Holst’s Planets, Shostakovich’s second violin concerto, and Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake in the film Black Swan. She holds a PhD in music theory from Yale University. Before her career in music theory, Táhirih was a planetary scientist at NASA, working with lunar samples, solar samples, and serving as a Downlink Operations Lead for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Scott Murphy has taught music theory at the bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral levels at the University of Kansas since 2001. Two of the foci within his relatively broad research activities are Brahms—for which he has won two publication awards from the Society for Music Theory—and screen music, about which he has written ten book chapters and articles. The most recent of the latter appears this spring in the Journal of Music Theory, and marks the most that an article in this sixty-six-year-old journal has featured screen music.