Faculty

Lolita Ritmanis is an Emmy Award-winning composer and ten-time nominee for her work on Warner Bros.’ Batman Beyond. Ritmanis is a 2022 Grammy Award-winning music producer of Women Warriors: The Voices of Change. She has composed the scores for Dzintars Dreibergs’s Escape Net, Daniel Kreizberg’s Tahlequah the Whale: A Dance of Grief and J. Michael Straczynski’s Babylon 5: The Road. In 2024, she debuted two original concert works at Carnegie Hall for the world premiere of Babylon 5. In 2021, she was Oscar shortlisted for Best Original Score with her 70-minute symphonic and choral score for the feature film Blizzard of Souls, which earned her the Society of Composers and Lyricists Award for Best Score for an Independent Film, the Hollywood Music in Media Award for Best Score for an International Feature Film, the Alex North Award for Best Score, the Golden Microphone Award for Best Instrumental Album and the Big Christopher (Latvia’s equivalent to the Academy Award).

Ritmanis is a co-founder of the Alliance for Women Film Composers, where she served as president from 2016 until 2019, as well as a founding member of Dynamic Music Partners. Recent career highlights include her original score for the Hallmark film Christmas in Rome and the documentary film Wild Daze (featuring Jane Goodall), as well as music for the gender parity series Flip the Script (starring Lake Bell). She has worked alongside fellow Dynamic Music Partners Michael McCuistion and Kristopher Carter on fan-favorite productions, including Young Justice, Batman: The Killing Joke (starring Mark Hamill), Justice League (for which Ritmanis earned a Primetime Emmy Award nomination), Batman Beyond, Teen Titans, Ben 10, Batman: The Animated Series and the Primetime Emmy Award-nominated musical Batman: The Brave and the Bold, “Mayhem of the Music Meister” (starring Neil Patrick Harris).

Ritmanis’s concert works have been performed at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, Koerner Hall in Toronto, Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, The Krakow International Film Music Festival, Fimucité International Film Music Festival in Tenerife and Playfest in Ubeda, Spain. Prior to focusing her career on composition, she was an orchestrator on over 100 films, mini-series and television programs, including Lethal Weapon 4, The X-Files: Fight the Future and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. 

Early in her career, Ritmanis learned from masters while working for such composing greats as Michael Kamen, Basil Poledouris, Mark Snow and Shirley Walker, among many others. She received her formal education at the Dick Grove School of Music, specializing in film scoring. In addition to teaching in the Screen Scoring program at USC Thornton School of Music, Ritmanis has led masterclasses and seminars at Columbia College Chicago, Berklee College of Music, New York University and Hong Kong Baptist University. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Television Academy, National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, and Society of Composers and Lyricists. In 2018, Ritmanis was honored with the BMI Champion Award, followed by the BMI Impact Award in 2022.