Emily Bear

Emily Jordan Bear was born on August 30, 2001, in Rockford, Illinois, and started playing piano and writing music before she could properly read. By five she had made her professional debut at the Ravinia Festival, the youngest performer ever to take that stage. A string of appearances on The Ellen DeGeneres Show starting at age six turned her into a familiar face, but the attention never turned her into a novelty act. She kept composing, kept performing, and built a career that moves between classical, jazz and pop without much fuss about the boundaries. Orchestras and ensembles across North America, Europe and Asia have played her work and performed alongside her, including dates at Carnegie Hall, the Hollywood Bowl, the Montreux Jazz Festival and Jazz Open Stuttgart. She won two Morton Gould Young Composer Awards, the youngest person ever to receive one, and two Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composers Awards. In 2013 she released Diversity, an album of her own jazz compositions produced by her mentor and manager Quincy Jones. Four years later came Into the Blue, an EP with her jazz trio, and in 2017 she became the youngest performer in the history of the Night of the Proms tour. Her 2019 EP Emotions marked the first time she sang her own songs on record. She also plays on the 2015 Broadway cast recording of Doctor Zhivago. The biggest turn came when she and Abigail Barlow wrote The Unofficial Bridgerton Musical, an album inspired by the Netflix series, released in 2021. It won the 2022 Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album and made Bear the youngest nominee and winner ever in that category. Forbes put her on its 2022 30 Under 30 list. In 2023 she scored Dog Gone, which made her the youngest person to score a feature film for release on a streaming platform, and that same year she toured as the featured pianist on Beyoncé's Renaissance World Tour. Barlow and Bear went on to write songs for Disney's Moana 2 in 2024. Across her career she has contributed to a handful of films and TV productions, with her work as a composer and performer stretching from concert halls to streaming releases.[edit]