The Official Penka Kouneva Website/Bio

PENKA KOUNEVA

Composer

MY APPROACH TO FILM SCORING

I harness my talent, imagination, consummate professionalism, and passion to support the director’s vision, and embody his/her storytelling into music. I continually strive to refine my understanding of characters and story, and to nurture my musical skills, palette, and expressive power. The crucial part of the collaborative process are the meetings with you, the director, where I play the score-in-progress, you respond with feedback, and ideas flow back and forth openly. From this dynamic exchange, the score grows organically and breathes life into your film. It also conveys to the audience emotional depth, conceptual scope, and hidden subtext that is not in the visuals or dialogue. I strive to elevate both the artistic and the production value of your film tenfold. I am a resource, an anchor, a fundamental support to the filmmakers. With patience and infinite resourcefulness (and a magic wand), I resolve all creative, budgetary, logistical, and political problems that come along. I always deliver tenfold and go beyond the call of duty. In the end, it’s all about your FILM being the very best it can be.

AWARDS

Sundance Institute - Film Composers Lab Fellowship

Named by Howard Shore (Academy Award recipient, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy) as “One to Watch”
The Hollywood Reporter, The New Breed: The New Generation of Scoring Contenders

Received Two Ovation Awards and Seven Nominations (including Best New Musical) for “STEEL: John Henry and the Shaker,” An Original Blues Musical

ASCAP Film Scoring Workshop

Best Music for Original Music Theatre, North Carolina Theatre Awards for “And Mary Wept”

Grand Prix for Songwriters Under 18, World Music Festival, Tokyo

Aspen Music Festival Composition Fellowships – Four Years

Aaron Copland Award and Residency

Meet the Composer Fellowship

American Composers Forum–Los Angeles Fellowship

ACF-LA Subito Grant for Career Advancement

North Carolina Artist Fellowship

Mary Duke Biddle Fellowship for Composition Studies, Duke University

BIO

Penka Kouneva is a Sundance Composer Fellow and a Hollywood film composer blending her native Eastern-European influences with modern orchestra, medieval chant, rock, and electronica. To date, she has scored 9 independent features, 4 television films for the SciFi channel, and episodic TV shows.

These include the slasher MIDNIGHT MOVIE, crime dramas THE THIRD NAIL and RICHARD III (starring David Carradine), family western THE CONNECTICUT KID, sci-fi political suspense film NOVEMBER, four action-adventures for the SciFi Channel (including ICE SPIDERS), psychological thriller DORIAN GRAY (starring Josh Duhamel), and additional music for FORENSIC FILES on CourtTV, DOG FIGHTS and MODERN MARVELS on The History Channel. Penka has also scored five documentaries, including the environmentalist film FLORIDA KEYS.

In addition to scoring, Penka is a busy orchestrator on studio films, including TRANSFORMERS, PIRATES 3, HOSTEL I and II, MATRIX 2, 3, LIZZIE MCGUIRE MOVIE, TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2, etc. Among her mentors, she is most indebted to Cliff Eidelman (who recommended her for three crucial scoring assignments), and to Bruce Fowler, Patrick Williams and Lee Holdridge, who, upon her arrival to Hollywood in 2000, snapped her as their consummate orchestrator.

Penka has been honored with WorldFest's Platinum Remi for Best Score, the Aaron Copland Award and the prestigious Sundance Institute Composer Fellowship.

Her scoring demonstrates a broad creative range and stylistic versatility including drama, crime, family, horror, thriller, action-adventure, sci-fi, and period films. Penka's music possesses a timbre of its own: emotive, haunting and soulful.

Penka was born and raised in Bulgaria, started piano lessons and 6 and wrote incidental music for children's theater show at 12. Before arriving in Hollywood, Penka enjoyed a successful career as a classical concert composer. Her orchestral works won prestigious awards including Meet the Composer Fellowship, three Aspen Festival Awards, North Carolina Artist Fellowship, etc. In 1997, she received the first-ever Doctorate in Composition at Duke University, thus making history at this distinguished institution. She studied with the celebrated orchestral composer Stephen Jaffe who convinced Duke's Graduate School to establish a Doctorate for her to continue at Duke. Penka was also influenced by the postmodernist minimalism of the Dutch composer Louis Andriessen and the Medieval Chant performed by Barbara Thornton's Sequentia Ensemble.