photo by Olivier Lovey
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.”
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Ella van der Woude grew up in Sion, a small town in the Swiss mountains. She has been making music since her childhood. “For long as I can remember I have had an instrument in my hands. Before I was officially allowed to take lessons, I was playing anything I could find. A flute, or a piano that was laying around in the house. It’s always been around me.”
From age 6, Ella started attending piano lessons. As a teenager, she and her brothers played their own music together. After they had left town, her interests started to veer more towards pop music and heavy metal. By the time she was 18, Ella moved to Amsterdam to study Vocals at the Conservatory, graduating in 2010. She performed in various indie bands that gained a healthy amount of buzz, before setting her sights on the master Composing for Film in 2012.
This program connected Ella with makers of the Film Academy, creative peers that have become close collaborators over the longer haul of her career. After honing her craft with various short film scores, Ella’s work on Guido Hendrikx’s Among Us and Ena Sendijarević’s Import gained early praise. These projects put her on the radar to eventually score bigger feature films, including Halina Reijn’s directorial debut Instinct.
Ella continued working on her own music in-between movie commissions: the alternative pop project ELLA was produced and recorded with Stew Jackson (Phantom Limb, Massive Attack) in 2017. Additional material from this project was compiled on the record songs from 2014-2016. In 2020, Ella recorded Solo Piano, a collection of intimate self-produced piano instrumentals recorded in her old apartment in Amsterdam, composed as a symbolic send-off to a place where much of her creativity had bloomed.
Film projects continued to mount at the turn of the decade, including film Mees Peijnenburg’s film debut Paradise Drifters (2020), Sasha Polak’s drama Silver Haze (2023) and Naomi Pacifique’s shortfilm looking she said i forget (2024). Ella’s scores for Take Me Somewhere Nice, Instinct, Moloch, and Above The Dust were all released as standalone albums, including her compositions for Armand, licensed by Sony Music film score off-shoot label Milan Records.
With each new project under her belt, Ella remains a sought-after composer and artist, whose playful composing methods, inventive sound mining and openness rhymes seamlessly with creative minds aiming to break the mold within the art of filmmaking. ”I wouldn’t say I work so much on a conceptual level. For the most part, I just need to have something in my hands… and allow one sound to lead to another.”