NELSON, Jesi

  JJesi Nelson is a Korean born, Wisconsin raised, Los Angeles based composer for film & media. She is an alumna of the highly competitive Sundance Film Music & Sound Design Lab (2017) held at Skywalker Ranch, and was the recipient of the Sundance Institute and Time Warner Foundation grant, where 11 diverse independent artists were chosen from different Sundance labs, in its continued efforts to discover and support independent artists from diverse backgrounds. She is also an alumna of the prestigious ASCAP Composers Workshop with Richard Bellis (2018).

As a result of the Sundance labs, she scored Nijla Mu’min’s award winning feature film JINN, which made its premiere at the 2018 SXSW to great acclaim, with a theatrical and nationwide release later in the year. She was also chosen to write the music for the 2018 Sundance Film Festival trailer played before each film.

She assisted composer Michael Kramer from 2015-2017, where she wrote additional music for the Emmy nominated series Lego Star Wars: The Freemaker Adventures and Emmy nominated series Lego Ninjago: Masters of Spinjitzu, under his lead. She now co-composes with Kramer on the animated tv series “Novelmore” (and co-composer Jay Vincent), as she continues to write additionally for an array of projects in film and television while also scoring her own projects. You can hear her music in recent projects like Kylie Eaton’s proof of concept short film “Kinetic”, Mikaela Bruce’s short films “Beyond Words” and “Hermana”, 2019’s “Liberation Heroes: The Last Eyewitness” (co-composed with Jackson Greenberg) and MTV’s “Save Our Mom’s” campaign, directed by Minhal Baig and produced by Lena Waithe, with new and exciting projects to soon be announced.

Jesi received her BFA in Music Composition and Technology from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Master of Fine Arts in Music Composition for the Screen at Columbia College.