Kristen Baum

Kristen Baum divides time between composing music for film and concerts and writing poetry and children’s literature. Her film music spans multiple genres, including string quintet, small ensemble, computer-generated sound palettes and hybrid scores that blend field recordings with traditional instruments. She has special affection for art song composition, and has set poems by Sarah J. Sloat and Sally Rosen Kindred among others.

A native Oregonian, she was raised in Michigan, and now lives in Los Angeles. She earned a Master of Music in Theory and Composition from Youngstown State University. Her Baccalaureate is in Music with a Piano Performance emphasis.

Her concert works have premiered in Hollywood, Nashville, Michigan and virtually from Berlin. Her song set based on poems by Sally Rosen Kindred is scheduled to premiere in the D.C. area in 2024. While her current focus is on art song, Kristen is in development for her first opera, with a chosen story and librettist.

Kristen is a Sundance Fellow, a participant in the film composing lab for narrative fiction. While there, she was mentored by Alan Silvestri, Harry Gregson-Williams, Christopher Young, and George S. Clinton, and Ed Shearmur. Her poetry has appeared in Fairy Tale Magazine, Menacing Hedge, The Muleskinner Journal and elsewhere. She is a Best of the Net nominee and Poet of the Month (July 2021) for Moon Tide Press.

When she isn’t composing or writing, she loves testing new recipes, studying fairy tales, watching hummingbirds hatch, and collecting twigs for her fairy garden.