DECEMBER 5, 2022 - She is an award-winning film and television composer and is known to Star Trek fans as the first woman to compose the score for a franchise episode. Today in Star Trek history, Nami Melumad was born.

Melumad was born December 5, 1988 and grew up in Ramat Gan, a city in the Tel Aviv District in Israel, and studied music theory, composition, flute performance, and chemistry in high school. She told VoyageLA in 2018, “I wrote most of the songs for our high school musical, which landed me my first paid gig as a composer: writing original music for a theater show. I always enjoyed composing, but what made me excited about composing for the stage was how my music fits in a bigger form of art – like theater: I loved how it completed the visual experience. I began to develop an interest in storytelling and became fascinated by movies. I would often sit on the piano for hours to figure out a chord progression I heard in a movie score. I used to compose my own themes for imaginary scenes from movies I watched and that’s when I realized composing for the screen is a passion of mine.”

Melumad’s credits stretch back as far as 2009 and include scores for videos, shorts, and, of course, films, and television episodes and series. Her first Star Trek entry was the Star Trek: Short Treks episode, “Q&A,” and she has gone on to score Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and Star Trek: Prodigy. She has talked about the new family she discovered with Star Trek and how exciting and rewarding it has been to work on the franchise.

Outside of Star Trek, Melumad has recently composed the music for the Netflix series, The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window and for the Marvel film, Thor: Love and Thunder, collaborating on the latter with fellow Star Trek composer Michael Giacchino. She has been nominated for numerous awards and has won, most recently, an International Film Music Critics Association award for her original score for the video game, Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond and a BMI Film Music Award for the short film, Colette, which was written and directed by Michael Giacchino’s brother, Anthony.

As we look forward to hearing her music again this week on Star Trek: Prodigy, please join us today in wishing Nami Melumad a very happy birthday!