Mateo Messina

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Mateo "Matt" Messina (born 1972 in Seattle, Washington) is an American soundtrack composer perhaps best known for working on the soundtrack to the 2007 film Juno.

Messina has composed the soundtracks for the films Little Man on Campus, The Diamond Nose, Capri, For Mature Audiences Only, The Freak, Party Foul, Cleanup on Aisle Five, Blind Mice, Terra, Questions & Answers, Coming Up Easy, Missing Sock, The Handkerchief, Quietness of Copper, Commercial, Spray, Thank You for Smoking, Bondage, Jump!, Out of Omaha and most recently the Academy Award-winning Juno. His style of songwriting and composition has earned him accolades within the recording industry, including the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.^[1] He has received two Best Score awards: the Festival Tous Courts in France for The Freak and the One Reel Film Festival in the United States for Terra.^[2] He has also written music for a variety of commercials, including Nike, Microsoft, MTV, Honda, Pottery Barn, Volkswagen, Sony, Norelco, The North Face and Ford.^[3]

He is currently living in Los Angeles, California,^[4] but he returns to his native Seattle to compose an annual benefit concert for The Symphony Guild, raising funds for the Seattle Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center, having begun a connection with the hospital over a decade ago when a co-worker's daughter died in the hospital.^[5] He performed his tenth annual symphony in November 2007, titled "Symphony Legacy". He is known for incorporating different types of dance such as the tango and the flamenco into the performances, as well as the sounds of the Japanese taiko drums and the Australian didgeridoo, the hard rock band Alice in Chains, and Ann and Nancy Wilson, the members of the band Heart.^[4] He usually performs with the Northwest Symphony Orchestra and the Northwest Girlchoir.^[5]