Katrina Zemrak
Katrina Zemrak is an award-winning composer renowned for their diverse body of work, which includes over fifty short films, multiple podcasts and television series, and three feature films. Her standout feature film compositions include Two Lives In Pittsburgh, which won the 2023 Audience Award at Dances with Films in LA, and the animated musical fairy tale Bongee Bear and the Kingdom of Rhythm, which was nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 2019 Palm Springs Animation Convention. She also composed and supervised full post-production audio services for the Emmy-winning series The Chronicles of Jessica Wu.
Katrina’s expertise extends beyond composition. She has provided sound design for a wide range of projects, including short films, commercials, feature films, documentaries, and podcasts such as Earthbreak, History Daily, American Scandal, Business Movers, Tides of History, and American Criminal. In 2022, she was awarded “Best Sound Design” by the Indie Short Fest in Los Angeles for her work on the horror short film The Mannequin Man, directed by Kip Knight.
Her educational background includes a Master of Fine Arts in Music Composition for the Screen from Columbia College Chicago, which she completed in 2017 with a full-ride scholarship. That same year, she attended the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, having received a scholarship from the Game Audio Network Guild.
From 2019 to 2022, Katrina worked as a music editor, sound designer, and additional composer for Nickelodeon’s The Casagrandes and The Loud House, as well as for Nickelodeon’s animated pilots program. Additionally, she served as a music copyist and Pro Tools engineer for the Apple TV series Lady in the Lake. In 2022, she collaborated with Unbridled Sound and director Boaz Yakin on the feature dance film Once Again, enriching the project with dialogue editing and sound design to achieve a more musical flow.
Katrina’s contributions to the film scoring community have been recognized with several accolades. In 2015, she received the Volunteer of the Year Award from the California Independent Film Festival for her role as Chair of the International Film Scoring Competition. She was honored with the Allen Turner Award from Columbia College Chicago in 2014 for her original composition An Erratic State of Mind. Additionally, in 2013, she earned the Leadership Award from Columbia College Chicago for founding ScoFi (Score & Film), an organization dedicated to educating and networking student film composers with filmmakers and hosting guest speakers such as Eimear Noone and Craig Stuart Garfinkle.
Katrina’s compositions have been performed by leading orchestras in Los Angeles and Chicago, and her piece Many, Many Clementines was broadcast by Chicago’s classical radio station, WFMT.
