Dan Golding

Professor Dan Golding is Chair of Media and Communication at Swinburne University, the host of Screen Sounds on ABC Classic, and an award-winning composer and writer.

Dan is the author of Star Wars After Lucas (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), and with Leena van Deventer the co-author of Game Changers (Affirm Press, 2016). He also created the soundtrack for the BAFTA, DICE, and GDCA winning Untitled Goose Game (2019), which became the first game soundtrack to be nominated for an ARIA award in history. Other composing includes the soundtracks for Mars First Logistics (2023), Push Me Pull You (2016) and the Frog Detective series, for which his score for The Haunted Island (2018) won the inaugural APRA-AMCOS Australian Game Developer award for Best Music. Dan composed the theme for the ABC’s flagship podcast, ABC News Daily, as well as creating Swinburne’s next_gen now audio branding.

Dan co-hosts the popular film music podcast Art of the Score, and in 2018, Dan presented What Is Music for ABC iView and Triple J with Linda Marigliano. He regularly hosts events and concerts, and has worked with every major Australian symphony orchestra to present to audiences in their thousands at the Sydney Opera House, Hamer Hall, and the Sidney Myer Music Bowl.

For over a decade Dan has written journalism and commentary for a wide variety of publications (ABC Arts, Crikey, Buzzfeed, Meanjin, Saturday Paper), and is a video essayist with more than 1 million views on YouTube. From 2014-2017 Dan was director of the Freeplay Independent Games Festival.