Stephen Gallagher
Stephen Gallagher is an Emmy Award-winning film and television composer based in Wellington, New Zealand, known for sweeping, emotionally driven scores that pair orchestral scale with intimate storytelling.
Selected Credits
His orchestral voice reached a global audience with The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim (Warner Bros. / New Line Cinema) — a World Soundtrack Awards finalist score that placed him among the leading composers working in epic fantasy. In 2026 he won the Children’s & Family Emmy Award for Outstanding Music Direction and Composition for Secrets at Red Rocks, co-composed with David Long — a score also recognised as a finalist at the APRA Screen Awards and New Zealand Screen Awards.
Stephen’s path to composing runs through some of modern cinema’s most celebrated music departments. He won an Emmy for Music Editing on Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back, served as music editor on The Hobbit trilogy — for which he also wrote the song “Blunt the Knives” — and composed additional music alongside Brian Eno’s score for The Lovely Bones. His collaborators have included Peter Jackson, Brian Eno, Ed Sheeran, Nick Cave, and Junkie XL.
Current projects include season two of Secrets at Red Rocks, the espionage comedy series New Zealand Spy (with Paul Williams), and the upcoming features The Curse of Ghost Island and Cringe (dir. Lisa Ovies).