Jeremy Zuckerman

Jeremy Zuckerman (born July 31, 1975) is an American composer of concert music, film and television music, music for modern dance, and experimental music. He is best known as the composer for the animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender and its sequel series The Legend of Korra.

At age five, Zuckerman began learning piano with his mother as his teacher. As a teenager and into his early 20s, he played guitar and synthesizer in heavy metal and coldwave bands. Zuckerman studied jazz and computer music at the Berklee College of Music, where he earned a bachelor's degree. He earned a master's degree at the California Institute of the Arts, where he studied modern composition with a focus on computer music and sonic art with Morton Subotnick, Mark Trayle, and Tom Erbe.

Jeremy Zuckerman grew up from a Jewish family in Brooklyn.

Zuckerman began his career as a television/film composer as one half of The Track Team, a music and sound design company based in Los Angeles. He started The Track Team in 2004 with co-founder Benjamin Wynn (a.k.a. Deru). Zuckerman created the music for the critically acclaimed television series, Avatar: The Last Airbender, which won a Peabody Award in 2008. Zuckerman also composed the music for the Avatar sequel series, The Legend of Korra. Zuckerman's music is also featured in DC's The Spectre, Jonah Hex, Green Arrow, and Superman/Shazam!: The Return of Black Adam.[10]

Together, Zuckerman and Wynn created the music for the feature films Just Peck and A Leading Man, and the Nickelodeon TV series Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness.

In 2017, after two Emmy Award wins and five nominations, Zuckerman and Wynn announced the dissolution of The Track Team to pursue their creative and professional paths independently.[11][12]

Zuckerman went on to score the first three seasons of MTV and VH1's Scream, as well as the PBS documentaries Nature: Snow Monkeys and Nature: Yosemite. Other documentaries include Beartrek, Stuntman, and This Little Land of Mines.[13]

Other notable film and TV projects include the 2020 Jeff Baena film Horse Girl, and an episode of the experimental Showtime series Cinema Toast.[14][15] Both of which are collaborations between Zuckerman and Josiah Steinbrick. The Cinema Toast episode, titled Quiet Illness is written by Aubrey Plaza, and is her directorial debut.[16]

Zuckerman has also composed the music for director Natasha Kermani's films Lucky and V/H/S/85.[17]

In 2023, Zuckerman along with The Echo Society, composed the score to the Darren Aronofsky film Postcard from Earth.[18] Postcard from Earth is the first film to be created for and presented at Sphere in Las Vegas.[19]

Zuckerman is a founding member of The Echo Society, a Los Angeles-based collective whose mission is to gather, inspire, enrich and connect the community through the creation and performance of new sonic and visual art.[20] The Echo Society's other founding members include composers Brendan Angelides (aka Eskmo), Judson Crane, Nathan Johnson, Rob Simonsen, Joseph Trapanese, and Benjamin Wynn.[21]

Zuckerman's music for The Echo Society concert series is predominantly chamber music, and the work "focuses on creating highly specific and controlled masses of sound using a combination of home-grown, semi-algorithmic processes and intuition. Using traditional orchestral instruments, these works explore complexity and transformation of sound and form, instead of the traditional melody/harmony paradigm."

Zuckerman has worked with choreographer Benjamin Levy on Everyone, Intimate, Alone, Visibly, "in which extended vocal techniques performed and processed in real-time by Jeremy, intersect with Levy’s choreography to form a complex gestural dialog." He also worked with Levy on Khaos, which was commissioned by the Scottish Dance Theatre. Zuckerman created the score for dancer/choreographer Lisa Wahlander's The Impermanent Sky, which was composed and performed live by Zuckerman using the audio programming language SuperCollider.[22]

Zuckerman composed the music to playwright Juli Crockett's theatre pieces [or, the whale], a spoken word opera which debuted in Los Angeles in 2001, and Orpheus Crawling, an experimental opera which premiered in 2007 at the New Original Works (NOW) Fest at REDCAT.[23]