Jonathan Beard

As a composer, Beard has worked on a variety of projects for chamber music, stage performances, and visual media. His composed the music for the documentary 3 Seconds in October - The Killing of Andy Lopez, which won the Emmy Award for Societal Concerns from the San Francisco/Northern California Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Other recent projects include his electroacoustic suite Ritual, his opera Cesare, Child of Night (OPERA UCLA premiere Fall 2021), the film scores to What Still Remains, Heavenquest, and Frank vs. God; and De tu puño y letra, an electronic video-sound collaboration with artist Suzanne Lacy. He has served on the composing teams for video games such as Star Wars: Battlefront I and II, and guest-composed for ABC's Once Upon a Time. For the stage, Beard co-composed the oratorio The Passion of Anne Frank for the Los Angeles Master Chorale as part of their Voices Within residency, and his original theatre-score for Driving Miss Daisy received an NAACP Theatre Award nomination.

In 2011 he joined the faculty at his alma mater, UCLA, where he teaches electronic music composition and music technology in the Herb Alpert School of Music. Beard has also worked extensively throughout the Los Angeles Area, working as co-conductor of the LA’s Best-ETM LA After-School Youth Orchestra, as a lecturer for the Cal State Northridge music department, and with the Pacific Symphony to help educate casual symphonic listeners about orchestration.

Beard finished Summerfield Waldorf School in Santa Rosa in 1999. He majored in musical composition at Stanford University, and received a master's degree from UCLA.