Gudrun Lehmann studied piano at the Musikhochschule Hamburg under Prof. Eugeni Koroliov, as well as singing, composition, arrangement and conducting. She soon identified film music as her focus and made it the subject of her thesis. At the same time, she studied German language and literature at the University of Hamburg and successfully completed state examinations to qualify as a secondary school teacher. During her studies, she worked as a theatre pianist, chanson accompanist, stage choir singer and keyboardist (for the salsa band Las Mujeres, among others). As an ensemble member of the Kampnagel theatre group Maskon, she composed numerous theatre compositions.
After studying abroad in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1990, she was involved with various musical theatre productions, including Cabaret/Schmidt's Tivoli Theater, Cats/Operettenhaus, Lion King/Stage Theater, Evita/Landestheater Schleswig-Holstein, Zauberflöte/Theater für Kinder Hamburg and further productions. In addition, she completed graduate studies in cultural management at the Musikhochschule Hamburg.
In 1996, she was commissioned with the theme song and score music for the ARD TV-series Schule am See. After the birth of her children, she increasingly turned to the field of children's formats. She composed music for the well-known TV-series Die Sendung mit der Maus, for Sony BMG, she developed the musical children’s radio play series Mauseschlau & Bärenstark with a top-class cast including Stefan Gwildis. As co-producer, director and composer she has supervised the publishing of numerous CDs in this series since 2006. She has also worked as a music consultant for the label For Films (Klaus Maeck/Fatih Akin).
She returned to film music and composed the score for the 26-part English comedy format Funnymals, which was sold and broadcast worldwide with great success. Moreover, she has created music for short films and series. Gudrun Lehmann has a keen sense for the dramaturgical role of music in connection with films, texts and plays. Her goal is to find her own musical language for different genres and their target groups.
In her capacity as a film composer and cultural manager, she launched the label FilmSoundHamburg in 2010. Furthermore, she organised the international summer academy of the same name, where top-notch international film composers such as Patrick Doyle, Jan Kaczmarek, Michael Nyman, Shigeru Umebayashi and junior scholarship holders met annually from 2011 to 2014 in Hamburg to work and live together.
With FilmSoundHamburg, Gudrun Lehmann manages innovative projects and events that deal with the connection between film and music. In 2016, for example, interactive film and music project Mix the City Hamburg was created in collaboration with well-known Israeli mashup artist Kutiman on behalf of the Studio Hamburg Production Group subsidiary Letterbox and its partners Hamburg Marketing and Elbphilharmonie.
The Hamburg-based composer is also involved in the international female industry network WIFT and the German movement Pro Quote Film. As a representative of both networks, she advocates increasing the proportion of women in the film industry to 50 % in all departments in front of and behind the camera, especially in film composition, where women are incredibly underrepresented.
