Ella van der Woude

Ella van der Woude is an Award-Winning Swiss-Dutch film composer whose works include Halfdan Ullman Tøndel’s drama Armand (2024), Halina Reijn’s psychological thriller Instinct (2019) and Ena Sendijarević’s roadmovie Take Me Somewhere Nice (2019). In 2022, Ella became the first female film composer to win a Golden Calf (the Dutch equivalent of the Oscar) for Nico van den Brink’s horror picture Moloch (2022). For her score of Armand, she won the Prix de la meilleure création sonore in Cannes with sound designer Mats Lid Støten. In the same year, Ella scored Above The Dust with fellow composer Juho Nurmela, the latest film by the prolific, legendary Chinese director Wang Xiaoshuai. Ella is a classically-trained pianist whose solo works traverse the vocabularies of both experimental and pop music. A proficient singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, her guiding principles as a film composer arrive from an intuitive process of exploring sounds. “The search for sounds that resonate is almost more important than the composition. My compositions tend to flow from the instruments that I choose for the film. It is more of a research of sound, in which the compositions will gradually find their place.”