Location: Sausalito, CA
Medium: Music, Composition
Website: magikmagikorchestra.com
Minna Choi was born in 1981 in Berkeley, California, the only child of Korean immigrant parents, and lived there until she was twelve before her family moved to Maryland. After college in New York, where she studied communications, she returned to the Bay Area for graduate study in composition at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where she studied under Elinor Armer.
Between her first and second year of graduate school, Choi founded Magik*Magik Orchestra, which debuted at Herbst Theatre in 2008 performing the West Coast premiere of Jonny Greenwood’s Popcorn Superhet Receiver to a sold-out house. What began as a small ensemble grew into a flexible pool of roughly 150 rotating musicians — scalable from a solo violinist to an eighty-piece symphony — organized as a nonprofit and serving for years as the in-house orchestra of Tiny Telephone Studios. As the group’s music director, lead arranger, and conductor, Choi has written arrangements and led performances for more than two hundred artists, including Death Cab for Cutie, Weezer, Third Eye Blind, The Dodos, John Vanderslice, Thao, and Mike Patton, and led a seventy-piece incarnation of the orchestra backing Sting before 2,500 people at Davies Symphony Hall in 2009.
Choi’s work expanded into film and television scoring, including orchestral arrangements for Looper, Kill the Messenger, and Young Ones, and additional music for Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life. In 2019 she composed the original score for Sophia Nahli Allison’s documentary short A Love Song for Latasha, which premiered at the Tribeca Festival and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Film at the 93rd Academy Awards in 2021. From 2014 until its close in 2023, MagikMagik served as the touring house band for Pop-Up Magazine’s live shows nationwide. Choi was named to 7x7 magazine’s “Hot 20 Under 40” in 2011, released a solo debut LP, MagikMagik, on Chris Walla’s Trans- label in 2015, and in 2023 she and MagikMagik signed on as music director for Unlikely Collaborators. She now lives in Sausalito, continuing as founder and artistic director of MagikMagik Orchestra.
Choi’s work sits at the intersection of orchestral composition and popular music, built on lush, warm string and horn arrangements that she scales to fit whatever a project needs, from a single string quartet to a full symphonic ensemble. Her arranging voice favors intimacy over bombast: even in large-scale settings, her charts tend to foreground emotional clarity, giving indie-rock and pop songwriters an orchestral frame without overwhelming the original material.
As a conductor and de facto bandleader, she has built her career on collaboration — assembling and leading rotating pools of freelance musicians for tours, studio sessions, film scoring dates, and one-off premieres alike. That same sensibility carries into her scoring work for documentary film, where her compositions lean spare and elegiac, and into her own original songwriting, which merges orchestral pop with the production sensibilities of the indie-rock world she has long worked alongside.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
Claim this page → to update your own profile.