Jeanine Cowen

About Jeanine

Jeanine Cowen is chair of the Screen Scoring program at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music and is an active media composer and educator. She trained at Northwestern University as a classical percussionist, graduated from Berklee College of Music with a degree in both film scoring and music production and engineering, and holds a Master of Arts in Creative Business Leadership from Savannah College of Art and Design. As a highly experienced technologist with extensive musical training in classical, jazz, and contemporary genres, she excels in creative, collaborative productions with credits spanning the film, television, game, and music industries.

She maintains an active teaching presence in audio and game development, as well as in music composition, production, and technology. She has taught in-residence and online at Berklee, Interlochen Center for the Arts, University of Southern California, CDIA-Boston University and Pluralsight. Formerly the vice president for curriculum and program innovation at Berklee, she now serves as professor of practice/chair of the Screen Scoring Master’s program at the Thornton School of Music within the University of Southern California. She is an experienced and skilled educator and innovator.

Her compositions have been heard throughout film, television, video games and the stage in works which include the Emmy Award-winning PBS mini-series The Great War, the definitive documentary The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo, Midway Games’ Lord of the Rings Online, Shadows of Angmar, and the critically acclaimed off-Broadway play Rapt. Collaborating with fellow composer and music technologist Stephen Webber, her work as a percussionist can be heard and seen on Webber’s album Stylus Symphony.

She is a frequent conference presenter in the U.S. and abroad, having recently delivered talks at GameSoundCon, Espacio Fundación Telefónica, the Women in Film & Media Summit, the Audio Engineering Society, the Women’s Empower Symposium, MONDO.NYC and others.