Catherine Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American composer, orchestrator, and pianist who strives to illuminate the meaning of media through diverse harmonic language, colorful orchestral textures, and unique sound design.
While immersed in film, media, and video game music from an early age, she did not realize her passion for composing until moving to New York to learn orchestration and eventually study harmony & arranging under two-time Emmy-Award winning composer D.D. Jackson. There, she also strengthened her expertise of orchestral, electroacoustic, experimental, and traditional Asian music, allowing her to bring different musical styles and compositional techniques to her scoring process.
Currently a composers' assistant at Blizzard, she is experienced with interactive media and game music. Catherine is a credited co-composer on the World of Warcraft: Dragonflight soundtrack, assisting Glenn Stafford and the music team with additional writing, arranging/MIDI orchestration, mixing, and more. Her most recent engagements at Blizzard include Wwise implementation, additional arranging, and technical play-testing/quality-assurance work on Diablo IV under composers Ted Reedy and Leo Kaliski. Currently, she is assisting Adam Burgess with mixing, editing, and Wwise tasks for Overwatch 2.
In addition to composing, Catherine has worked for composers Penka Kouneva, Germaine Franco, Tom Howe, Mark Isham, Michael Kramer, Kubilay Uner, and Steven Melin, to name only a few, assisting on their film and television scores. Some projects she was involved with include Dragon Age: Absolution (2022), Disney's Encanto (2021), Bill & Ted: Face the Music (2020), The American Traitor: Axis Sally (2021), and the original Sky TV series Murder at the Cottage (2021). She was also a mentee of the AWFC mentorship program where she learns from Christophe Beck (Frozen, Ant Man, WandaVision).
Catherine holds a B.M. in Piano Performance with a Sociology minor (concentration in the Asian American Experience), summa cum laude, from the University of South Florida and an MFA in Music Composition for the Screen from Columbia College Chicago. When not writing music, she can be found playing video games, reading books, and going on adventures.
