Pinar Toprak


Pinar Toprak is a Turkish-born American composer, conductor, and musician, who specializes in creating thematic film and television scores.

Early life and education

Toprak was born and grew up in Istanbul, Turkey. Her father was an accountant, who supported Toprak's interest in music and movies, particularly westerns and Superman. Toprak has said she was always drawn to superheroes and comic books growing up. She memorized the dialogue from the 1978 film starring Christopher Reeve, and dubbed it to Turkish.
Toprak enrolled in the Istanbul State Conservatory, the oldest conservatory in Turkey. During her studies there, she focused on composition and multi-instrumentalism. She began as a violinist and later switched to guitar.
She finished high school at 16, and after her 17th birthday she moved to the United States. She lived with her brother in Wisconsin where she completed a short ESL program before enrolling at Berklee. During that time she found work as a jazz guitarist and pianist."
She received her Bachelor of Music in Film Scoring from Berklee in 2000 when she was 19 years old. Following her move to Los Angeles, she received a Master's in Classical Composition from the California State University, Northridge in 2002. It was at CSUN where she was recommended for an internship at Paramount Pictures at the age of 20.

Career

At Paramount she attended scoring sessions and worked for Hans Zimmer's production company, Media Ventures International. She also trained in programming sample instruments. She left Zimmer's company after a year to work as assistant to composer William Ross.
In 2006 she composed the score for the video game Ninety-Nine Nights, and then for Behind Enemy Lines 2. From that time onward, she worked on more than forty feature films and several video game and television projects. She wrote the fanfare for Skydance Media from 2010 to 2022.
Her score for the romantic comedy The Lightkeepers won the 2010 International Film Music Critics Association Award for Best Comedy Score and made it to the 2011 Academy Award Shortlist for Best Original Score. She composed the score for the documentary The Wind Gods, for which she received a second IFMCA award for Best Documentary Score in 2011. In 2017 she was hired by director Dean Devlin to compose the score for Geostorm but left after production companies Warner Bros. and Skydance Media hired a new director for the film's reshoots; she was later replaced by Lorne Balfe. The same year, composer Danny Elfman hired Toprak to write additional music for the 2017 DC film Justice League.
Toprak auditioned and pitched a main theme for the Marvel Studios film Captain Marvel, making her the first woman to ever score a major superhero film, and the first to compose for a film that made more than $1 billion.
In 2019 she received a nomination for the World Soundtrack Awards.
Toprak's other prominent works include the films The Lost City, Slumberland, Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie and Lonely Planet, and the television series Krypton, Stargirl, McMillions and Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft. She is the first Turkish composer to be nominated for an Emmy. Her work on the 2018 film The Tides of Fate earned her the 2019 ASCAP Shirley Walker Award, and also, her third IFMCA Award for Best Original Score for a Documentary Film in 2019.
In 2022, Amazon hired Toprak to compose and conduct a new theme for its Thursday Night Football telecasts, marking the first time a female composer wrote an original theme for the National Football League. Toprak recorded it at the Ocean Way studio in Nashville with an 70-piece orchestra. The new theme was met with wide praise.

Personal life

In 2008 Toprak married Thanos Kazakos, a music composer and sound design major from Greece. They had met at Berklee, and had a son and a daughter. They divorced in 2013. She currently resides in Los Angeles.

Discography

Film

Television

Video games

Other work