Jordan Plotner is a British/American award-winning composer, music artist, and writer based in Portland. His music has appeared in over fifty films, television shows, and commercials worldwide, and his concert music has been premiered in New York, Los Angeles, London, Beijing, Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur, and Malta. He has worked with esteemed film composers Marco Beltrami and Joe Trapanese, and has worked on projects for artists ranging from Hans Zimmer and Angelina Jolie to Daft Punk. He and his wife Lindsey are the folk duo Ned and Wendy the Band.
After graduating from The American School in London and the Royal Academy of Music pre-college program (concentrating in double bass and jazz studies), and after a brief gap-year stint as an avocado farmer, Jordan enrolled in the Yale Class of 2017. Thanks to a Creative and Performing Arts award, his original filmed opera, Harold, was premiered at Yale, and won “Best Narrative Film” at the Yale Student Film Festival.
In December of 2014, Jordan designed and built a new musical instrument using twelve beer bottles, a computer battery, recycled arcade video-game buttons, solenoid valves, a compressed air tank, and twelve 3D-printed mouthpieces modeled after the shape of his own mouth blowing across bottles. The instrument, ‘Helmholtz’s Harmonious Homebrew’ was profiled in various newspapers and online publications, and led to him being a featured speaker at the 2014 New Jersey Music Tech Expo.
The following year, in partnership with the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Yale-New Haven Hospital, Jordan helped to design and build a new medical device to improve the process of pediatric blood drawing. The research has since been published by the “Design of Medical Device Conference.”
Jordan completed his Yale degree in American Studies (graduating cum laude) with his honors thesis screenplay, “Sammy’s Field” - a fantastical story grappling with collective memory as it relates to the Holocaust and Little League Baseball. His advisor, Pulitzer Prize-Winning playwright, Donald Margulies, wrote that “Sammy’s Field achieves a kind of magical realism that captures a child’s sense of wonder at the enormous, inexplicable mysteries of life. Jordan Plotner’s own search for meaning and the seriousness of his artistry - whether expressed through music and sound, prose or screenwriting - speak to a young man’s genuine promise. That, in itself, is cause for celebration.”