Tamara O'Brien : Associate Artist
Artist website: http://www.tamaraobrien.com
Tamara was born in Sydney (1977) and started learning the piano at the young age of four years old and was composing her own piano music at age five. She took composition seriously in high school winning the State Schools Metropolitan North Music Festival Composition Competition in Year 10 and then again in Year 12.
Tamara is a graduate of the B.Mus/B.Ed course at the University of NSW in Music Education and has completed a Graduate Diploma in Orff Music with the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne. In 2003 Tamara steered her writing towards film and television when she attended the Screen Composition course at the Australian Film Television and Radio School in Sydney. She has since written for a large number of short dramas, documentaries, animations, and TV pilots and has recorded with A-list musicians such as David Hudson on Didgeridoo and soprano Emma Worthington-Lees and has recorded several film cues at Trackdown Scoring Stage in Sydney.
In 2004 Tamara was the recipient of the APRA Professional Development Award for Film and Television. With this grant she travelled to Hong Kong to meet with key industry professionals in Film and TV and then to Los Angeles where she was a participant in the 2004 ASCAP Film Scoring Workshop meeting composers such as Randy Newman, Alf Clausen and Marco Beltrami. She also had the opportunity to compose and conduct a major motion picture cue in the Newman Scoring Stage at Fox LA with the Hollywood Studio Orchestra. Also in 2004 Tamara was awarded a travel grant from the Australian Embassy in Berlin to attend the Berlinale Talent Campus. A working conference for young filmmakers where the 2004 theme was titled Music and Sound in Film.
Tamara's other accolades include a nomination in 2004 for Best Score for a Documentary in the APRA/AGSC Screen Music Awards for her score in Roger. In February 2005 Tamara was nominated for a MPSE Golden Reel, LA, for her work in the animation Crawlspace, and was selected to participate in the Kur-ring-ai Philharmonic Orchestra's 2005 Composer Workshop held in late July.
Biography provided by the composer — current to November 2005