2013 Composition alum James Craft can now add "Emmy-winning" to his title.

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James Craft at the 2026 Heartland Emmy Awards.

Craft picked up a Heartland Emmy this summer for his work scoring the PBS Wyoming documentary Mountain Roots: The Adventure Home, one of two awards the film won, the other being Best Director.

Born in France, Craft came to SFCM with a somewhat unconventional background: He majored in French and classics at Notre Dame and then spent years in Brooklyn writing, singing, and performing with his band La Strada. (He also played accordion.) He audited a few classes at SFCM in the spring 2011 semester and took lessons with Composition faculty emerita Elinor Armer as a sort of on-ramp to the program and began in fall.

"I was constantly playing music," Craft recalls of his time before arriving at SFCM, "but I didn't matriculate as a musician." SFCM, he says, "expanded my mind, expanded my skills. I learned to write formally; I worked a lot on compositional form. It was great, I loved it."

Craft studied with Armer as well as David Garner and David Conte and earned his master's degree before moving to Los Angeles where he spent a year studying film scoring in the SMPTV program at USC Thornton. 

After USC, Craft ended up at Nickelodeon. "I was basically creating a radio play, a show called Breadwinners. That involved dropping in dialogue, then creating space for the music, then timing out all the music and adding effects," he says. "It was a great show and really kind of nuts—fast-paced, 130 BPM, but I worked with the composer and it became a very intuitive and creative way of working."

Craft worked at Nickelodeon for a year, before, as he says, becoming, "pretty selective about the work I pursued. I gravitated toward projects that connected with me musically and thematically, rather than trying to demonstrate that I could do everything. I always approached the work as a composer first. But then I got into education and started an education company called Craft Music while I continued to work on my music." 

Craft met Mountain Roots director Mark Pedri at USC and partnered with him for three films: Dear Sirs, Afar & Below, and Mountain Roots, all three of which have won Heartland Emmys. (All told, Craft has 32 credits as a composer on IMDb.) Craft worked closely with Pedri on Mountain Roots, which follows Bennett, a 9-year-old climber, who travels from Wyoming to the Italian Alps with her grandfather to learn about her heritage, eventually connecting with her Italian family in the village where her ancestors have lived for generations.

 "It's all through her point of view," Craft says. "She's thinking about the past, her future, all these challenges, and so the music is extremely multicolored and multi-genre. It wasn't like a standard score in which you have very thought out-themes and a specific instrumental approach. We thought about this as moving through different colors: rock, classical, jazz, tango."

"Working with a director consistently," Craft continues, "you're writing for their films, their story. And they have their own tempos, their own imagination, their own vision, and you work together to come up with something that neither of you could have come up with alone."

Craft remains motivated by "that desire to push and learn new things." He returns to the European American Music Alliance (EAMA) Summer Music Institute every few years, run by Philip Lasser. It's a connection made by David Conte, who studied with famed teacher Nadia Boulanger in Paris; Lasser studied with Boulanger's closest colleague and disciple, Narcis Bonet.

"I have such a great connection with the Conservatory," Craft says, "and I always intend to stay connected: It changed my life and I have great mentors from my time there. I just love music, all kinds of music. I've never seen myself as hemmed in by a particular aesthetic. I just reach out and enjoy it."

Learn more about studying composition at SFCM.