Biography
Germaine Franco is an American film composer, conductor, songwriter, arranger, record producer and percussionist. She studied percussion and composition at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1984 and a master’s in 1987.
Franco is best known for her work on Disney animated features, including as orchestrator, songwriter and additional music contributor on Coco (2017) and as composer on Encanto (2021). She has also contributed as orchestrator or musician to films such as Rio (2011), The Book of Life (2014) and Dora and the Lost City of Gold (2019), and composed scores for Dope (2015) and Tag (2018).
She was the first woman to score a Walt Disney Animation Studios feature and the first Latina invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences music branch. Her score for Encanto won a Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score, among other honours.
