Joseph Shirley is an American composer.

After graduating from Loyola University in 2010, Shirley moved to Los Angeles and joined the University of Southern California’s Screen Scoring graduate program, a competitive year-long program which only accepts 20 students at a time. Shirley said his time in the program helped him a lot with his career.

“The greatest lesson that I learned is to do what it takes to write a good piece of music,” he said. “Work with it, dedicate yourself to it, and invest in yourself emotionally.”

After completing the program, Shirley met Ludwig Göransson who was looking to hire an assistant. Shirley applied for the position and was accepted right away. He said his first major project as a score programmer was the 2018 Marvel movie “Black Panther,” directed by Göransson’s fellow USC graduate Ryan Coogler. Göransson later won an Academy Award and a Grammy Award for the score.

He later arranged music for Christopher Nolan’s 2020 action sci-fi film “Tenet,” and now he shares a composer credit with Göransson for “The Book of Boba Fett.” He regards the Swedish composer as one of his mentors and role models.

“I learned how he would approach projects, how he would approach a film score, how he collaborated with people, how he managed budgets, how he would stay creative throughout the course of a film,” he said. “So, when I began to get my own work, I would look to him for advice and guidance.” Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.