Don Wilkins
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Don Wilkins is the chair emeritus of the Film Scoring Department at Berklee College of Music. He received a Bachelor of Music in composition from Berklee and trained as a music editor in Hollywood. Wilkins has more than 30 years of experience in scoring and supervising music for film and video productions. Hired to update and expand the original scoring courses at Berklee, he greatly expanded the Film Scoring Department, adding new courses to the curriculum and overseeing the formation of this major field of study, now one of the largest at the college.
His professional credits include feature films, documentaries, and series work for CBS (Hometown) and cable television (Breaking Ground). He scored the music for the Academy Award–nominated documentary short Urge to Build, and supervised the music on other nominated films, including Academy Award winner Karl Hess: Toward Liberty. His expressive score for A City in Bloom, commissioned for the Rose Kennedy Greenway in Boston, was nominated for a New England Emmy.
A dedicated teacher and mentor, he has supervised the music for more than 200 student film productions scored at Berklee and fostered the careers of many successful alumni in the film and television industry.
- Composer for feature films Sixteen, Mission Hill, The First Killing Frost, and Academy Award–nominated short Urge to Build
- Composer for television series Hometown and Breaking Ground, and cocomposer for America by Design
- Music supervisor for more than 200 short subjects
- Film music editor for network television specials and contributing arranger for network television movies River of Gold and Maybe I'll Come Home in the Spring
- Clinician on film music for National Film Board of Canada, Women in Film-New England, and International Association for Jazz Education (IAJE)
- Academy Award winner for Karl Hess: Toward Liberty and nominee for Kudzu