Biography
Terence Oliver Blanchard (born March 13, 1962) is an American jazz trumpeter, composer, and music educator. Blanchard started his career in 1980 as a member of the Lionel Hampton Orchestra, then Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. He has composed more than forty film scores and performed on more than fifty. He is a frequent collaborator with Spike Lee, and received his first nomination for the Academy Award for Best Original Score on Lee's 2018 film BlacKkKlansman.
From 2000 to 2011, Blanchard served as artistic director of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz. In 2011 he was named artistic director of the Henry Mancini Institute at the University of Miami. In the fall of 2015 he was named a visiting scholar in jazz composition at Berklee College of Music. In 2019, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), named Blanchard their Endowed Chair in Jazz Studies, where he will remain until 2024.
The Metropolitan Opera announced it will stage Blanchard's opera Fire Shut up In My Bones, with a libretto by Kasi Lemmons, in their 2021-2022 Season. As of 2019, this will be the first production by a black composer staged by the Metropolitan Opera in the organization's 136-year history.