Austin Hammonds is a film and media composer from Ashland Kentucky. Now based in Los Angeles California, he continues to have an active career in the film, television, and video game industries. Hammonds believes strongly in the expressive power of orchestral scores, bringing evocative and energetic themes and colors to each of his scores.

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In 2017, Hammonds graduated from Morehead State University in Morehead, Kentucky where he studied music under Dr. Matthew Taylor and began composing music, building his concert music repertoire. His works were written for various ensembles including the MSU trombone choir, the MSU “MoreSax” saxophone choir, and the MSU concert band. He premiered his piece Dawn Fanfare with the Cave Run Symphony Orchestra of Morehead, Kentucky in 2017.

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Hammonds continued his education at the University of Miami as a full tuition scholar and teaching assistant for the Media Writing and Production program at the highly acclaimed Frost 

School of Music. During his time there, he explored his passion for writing music for motion picture through film scoring classes as well as scoring his first short film. He studied under film composers Carlos Rafael Rivera (Godless 2017 , A Walk Among the Tombstones 2014) and Chris Boardman (Local Color 2006, Payback 1999) as well as orchestrator Gary Lindsay.

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Throughout his time at the University of Miami, Hammonds wrote the scores for 6 films that premiered at the Canes Film Festival in 2018 and 2019 and two films at the Scares and Scores Film Festival in 2017 and 2018. In 2019, Hammonds scored Santastein, written and directed by Manny Camilion and Ben Edelman, which had a screening at the Sarasota Film Festival. At the 2019 Henry Mancini Institute Chamber music concert, Hammonds performed his score for Love and Interest live to picture. His final collaboration as a Frost graduate student was with director Hemrajani, Apple Pie, premiered on PBS in the summer of 2019 featuring an electronic dance music score.

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His stylistic flexibility lends itself well to the field, as he has written a variety of scores for many different genres of film. Modeling composers that inspired him in his youth, Hammonds prides himself on composing music with a strong emphasis on orchestral writing.

“I use the orchestra for its wide range of emotional flexibility and believe it to be profoundly impactful when used appropriately. This is even true when the orchestra is used in tandem with other electronic or synthetic musical elements.”

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Hammonds then further continued his education in film scoring at the University of Southern California where he was recently graduated from the Thornton School of Music’s world-renowned Screen Scoring program's class of 2020. He also graduated with honors, recieving both the Harnell Outstanding Graduate Award as well as the Betty Rose Collaboration Award. While there, he studied orchestration and film composition with incredible faculty professionals such as Pete Anthony, Patrick Kirst, and Gary Schyman.

Austin Hammonds - Composer