Cindy O’Connor

A 2018 Emmy nominee for Outstanding Music Composition for a Series (Once Upon a Time), Cindy O’Connor is an accomplished composer and performer for film, television, and theater. She combines her love of musical theater, orchestral music, pop/rock, and electronic textures to create unique musical worlds for each project. Cindy spent her early years working for composer Mark Isham and arranging, orchestrating, and composing additional music for films such as A Dog’s Journey, Dolphin Tale, The Women, and Brian DePalma's The Black Dahlia. Her feature film scores include Forgiving the Franklins (Sundance), Deany Bean Is Dead (Amazon Prime), and the thriller Not Forgotten, starring Simon Baker. In television, Cindy spent seven seasons collaborating with Mark Isham and Michael Simon on the hit ABC series Once Upon a Time. The fantasy/adventure score featured live orchestra every week. Other TV credits include Once Upon a Time in Wonderland, the Starz series Crash and the NBC series The Black Donnellys.

Cindy began her career as a musical theater composer with All That He Was, winner of the Musical Theater Award in the Kennedy Center/ACTF Festival and published by Samuel French. Her other musical theater works include La Llorona/The Crying Woman (Off-Broadway), 40 is the New 15 (NoHo Arts Center), Powder Puff Pilots (about the early female aviators in 1929, workshopped at UC Irvine) and the recent Chicago hit parody, Flies! The Musical (Pride Arts Center).

As a performer, Cindy spent four years touring as a keyboard player and singer with rock superstar Pat Benatar, and she has performed as a singer and choir director with a cappella genius Petra Haden for concerts at the Ford, the Getty, and David Byrne’s Meltdown Festival in London. She has recently ventured into concert music, conducting the world premiere of her piece, “Archangel,” with the Hollywood Chamber Orchestra at the Wiltern in Los Angeles as part of The Future is Female concert, and conducting her piece “Sunrise” with the Moravian Philharmonic as part of the Hollywood Classics concert.

She is grateful every day for the chance to collaborate with talented artists to tell stories that touch people’s hearts and explore the wonders of the human spirit.