Contact
Departments
Courses Taught
TAC 250: Intro to Sound for Games
Education
BM, San Francisco Conservatory of Music
Q&A
What is your hometown?
Holland, MI.
What is your favorite recording? Why?
I Am All That I Need / Arroyo Seco / Thumbprint Scar by the Fleet Foxes, incredible intimacy and dynamism!
What are you passionate about outside of music?
Running, gaming, and women's basketball! GO VALKYRIES!!
Who were your major teachers?
MaryClare Brzytwa, Taurin Barrera, Dr. Cynthia Van Maanen.
What question do you wish students would ask sooner rather than later?
"What's a self-employed 401k?"
What was the defining moment when you decided to pursue music as a career?
When my dad gifted me Sibelius 5: Student for my 10th Christmas.
What was a turning point in your career?
Landing my first job in game audio working as a voice editor on The Sims 4! All of my work in games snowballed from that point, getting that first foot in the door was huge.
If you weren't a musician or teacher, what do you think you would be doing now?
I'd love to say something whimsical like marine biology, but realistically I'd be preparing taxes. I'm very passionate about personal finance, especially for freelancers!
What is your daily practice routine?
My work is diverse and constant; my daily routine that keeps me grounded is that I must start it with a 40 minute round-trip walk to my favorite coffee spot to drink an iced latte. Without that I am practically useless.
From a music history perspective, what year and city are most important to you, and why?
Paris, 1198: Viderunt Omnes changed the game and still goes hard.
What is your unrealized project?
I would love to make an existential avant-garde horror game centered around walking my reactive dog, Corndog.
Biography
Molly Monahan is a composer, music producer, and orchestrator whose work spans games, film, television, and concert music. She is currently a Music Designer on Fortnite: Battle Royale and has contributed to acclaimed titles including Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, Death Stranding 2, The Last of Us Part II: Remastered, Return to Monkey Island, Diner Dash: Adventures, and The Sims 4. Her film and television credits include Netflix’s One Piece live-action series, The Master and Margarita, and Ick.
As a concert music composer, Molly creates acoustic, electronic, and multimedia works that have been performed internationally at venues and festivals including the International Computer Music Conference in Shanghai, National Sawdust in Brooklyn, the Basklarinet Festijn in Utrecht, Berklee College of Music’s Splice Music Festival, and the Exploratorium in San Francisco in collaboration with the ClimateMusic Project. Her work has received recognition from the American Prize, Ti:ME, NextNotes, YoungArts, Christopher Newport University, and Webster University. In 2020, her string quartet Songs for João received an Honorable Mention from the American Prize in the Pops/Light Music Composition category.
She has participated in the Hot Air Festival in San Francisco and Sounding Now in Singapore, and was a resident of the 2018 Estalagem da Ponta do Sol Residency for Contemporary Music and Electronics in Madeira, Portugal.