Andy Hill
Andy Hill, since 2019 dean and director of studies of the Film Scoring Academy of Europe in Sofia, Bulgaria, is a thirty-five year veteran of the film and television music industry, former vice-president of music production for Walt Disney Studios, Grammy Award-winning music supervisor, founder of the MFA program in Music Composition for the Screen at Columbia College Chicago, and author of Scoring The Screen: The Secret Language Of Film Music (Hal Leonard, June 2017). Films for which he served as executive in charge of music production have earned nine Academy Awards in music categories. Projects for which Andy served as music supervisor include Ed Wood, Message In A Bottle, and James and the Giant Peach. In his current role as dean of the Film Scoring Academy, he directs its M.F.A. program in Music for Motion Pictures and Contemporary Media, recognized in 2022 and 2023 by the Hollywood Reporter as One Of The Twenty Best Places In The World To Study Film Music . His online composer service, Cinemuse Composer Coaching (https://www.scoringthescreen.com/composercoaching) offers private guidance in showreel development and career launch and rebooting.
In 2012, after five years directing the masters program at Columbia College, Andy was engaged to oversee the launch of the international MA in film scoring at Berklee College of Music, Valencia, Spain. He continued to teach and lecture in Europe for three years, and developed a “traveling classroom” for both aspiring media composers and filmmakers eager to learn how to more effectively employ music in cinematic storytelling. From 2015 to 2018, Andy served as a visiting lecturer and industry advisor for the masters program in Scoring for Film and Visual Media at Pulse College, Dublin, and has lectured for the University of Edinburgh, HKU, and the University of Austria at Krems. He has been a regular presenter for Krakow's Film Music Festival and Jan Kaczmarek's Transatlantyk Festival in Poznan. As A.W. Hill, he is the author of a trilogy of “metaphysical detective” novels published as the Stephan Raszer Investigations; with his son, Nathanael, the YA science-fiction novel, The Switch (2017), and most recently, Ministry (2022). His screenplay, TESLA, received top honors in the Northern Lights Screenplay Competition.
From late 2015 to 2019, Andy lived with his family in Nashville, Tennessee, where his company, CINEMUSE, provided music supervision and consulting services. He has three times led the Score-Com workshops for the Nashville Composers Association and contributed to On Location: Memphis on behalf of the Memphis Music Banq, as well as providing a lecture series on ‘Film Music for Filmmakers’ at Belmont University. Following his engagement by the Film Scoring Academy of Europe, he returned to Europe and to a new home in Sofia, Bulgaria.
Andy received his doctorate in film musicology from the University of South Wales, Cardiff, Wales in 2020.