about the artist

Cathryn S Davis is a creative composer with a career spanning over two decades in the arts. Her storytelling style is characterized by a melody-driven approach that leaves a lasting impression on the listener. Her love for composition was sparked at a young age when she began composing for her seventh-grade talent show. Over the years, she has honed her skills and is now recognized as a talented composer with unique stories, dimension and texture to her works.

Her background is extensive in the arts, having pursued acting, musical theatre, photography, and film production before returning, later in life, to her love for composition. After spending many years in Los Angeles pursuing acting, singing, and modeling, she worked for Vidal Sassoon and quickly moved to a Hawaiian advertising agency producing commercials and a video production company producing short films. Her love for the post-production stage led her to work with composers, and she eventually dreamt of being a film composer.

Cathryn completed her BFA in Music/Theatre from Texas Christian University, but didn’t study composition until 2016 when she received a scholarship to a specialized, contemporary music program of film scoring, composition, orchestration, and songwriting at McNally Smith College of Music in Saint Paul, Minnesota. 

Currently Cathryn is Composer in Residence for The Grays Harbor Symphony and College in Washington state.  In recent years, she has achieved several notable successes in her career.  In 2017, she composed, edited, and produced the video “Save Our Souls,” and was premiered by McNally Smith School of Music for solo, choir, children’s duet, and orchestra. In 2018, she won 2nd place in the Rachel Moore Choral Competition with her piece “The Dance of the Fairies.” In 2019, Cathryn was one of five composers selected from a national competition to work with five lyricists in the prestigious Nautilus Music Theatre Workshop. She also had her first film score, “Destined for Collision,” played by a live orchestra at the Minnesota Kino Film Score Festival. In 2020, she won an orchestral competition to have “II. THE SACRAL CHAKRA” recorded by The Northern Film Orchestra in Manchester, England.

Cathryn is currently scoring a film about Grays Harbor history commissioned by the Grays Harbor Symphony and writing a musical with a common issue among women of all ages, shapes, sizes, races, and colors. She now resides in Olympia, Washington.

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photo by Jessica Stalz