Bio

Composer, orchestrator, and performer Karim Elmahmoudi was one of a handful of composers selected in November 2015 as an American Prize in Composition Special Citation Recipient celebrating the variety and vitality of American Composers of Works for Orchestra. 

As an award winning composer of music for the concert hall, film scores and video games, his works have been performed worldwide in Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Bulgaria, Ireland, Bratislava, Prague, Australia, and at such iconic venues as London’s Abbey Road, New York’s Carnegie Hall and Los Angeles’s Walt Disney Concert Hall. 

In 2006, Karim began working with Christopher Young on Spiderman 3, Sleepwalking, Untraceable and other projects as orchestrator and arranger. He has also worked with Academy Award winner Michael Giacchino on the hit television series, Lost, where his tasks included arranging, orchestrating, and conducting several cues for the show.  Karim has also arranged and orchestrated several high profile video games including Star Wars – The Old Republic (Disney/Lucasarts) which was recorded by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra at Skywalker Sound, Dante’s Inferno (Electronic Arts), Disneyland Kinect (Disney), and many others.

Equally at home in the concert hall as the film scoring stage, Mr. Elmahmoudi has received commissions from the Los Angeles City Arts Counsel, Flagstaff Arts Counsel, The Los Angeles County Arts Commission, and BMI.  He counts amongst his favorite composers Dmitri Shostakovich, Gustav Mahler, Sergei Prokofiev, Jean Sibelius, Ralph Vaughan Williams, John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, Elliot Goldenthal, and Bernard Herrmann. Karim also performs with several symphony orchestras including the South Bay Philharmonic Orchestra, the Master Sinfonia, and the Los Angeles Doctors Symphony where he plays the bass trombone and is the orchestra’s Composer in Residence. He has performed with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Academy under Marin Alsop and the Pacific Symphony Orchestra under Carl St. Clair. His concert music ranges from solo piano pieces to large scale symphonic works including symphonies, a violin concerto, piano concerto, and many other symphonic works.

After studying at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Composition extension program and privately with Alexis Alrich for five years, Mr. Elmahmoudi earned a Masters of Music degree at the prestigious University of Southern California Thornton Graduate School of Music where his professors included Christopher Young, James Newton Howard, Pete Anthony, Richard Kraft, Joel McNeely, Jeff Atmajian, and Lennie Moore. Karim also studied with the renowned composer and orchestrator Conrad Pope, whose credits include Star Wars (Episodes I-III), Jurassic Park, the Harry Potter series, The Matrix Trilogy, and Troy, along with much else. Mr. Elmahmoudi was awarded the BMI Outstanding Achievement Award in 2007, Nova Award in 2014, and is a semi-finalist of the 2015 and 2016 American Prize in Composition and Finalist in 2017.  Mr. Elmahmoudi was profiled in February, 2015, by the International Musician magazine about his passions for music and astronomy and how these converged with Flagstaff Arizona’s Dark Sky concert festival.