Film composer and songwriter Germaine Franco's varied background includes work in television, documentaries, and video games, but the California native is best known for her work on family films such as Dora and the Lost City of Gold (2019) and Disney's Coco (2017) and Encanto (2021). She was the first female composer to be hired by DreamWorks Animation and Pixar, and the first Latina composer to join the music branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

A percussionist and keyboardist, Germaine Franco first studied composing at Rice University's Shepherd School of Music, where she earned a bachelor's degree in 1984. She returned to the university for her subsequent master's and started earning composing credits on film shorts in the early '90s. Her first feature film as composer was 1993's The Tent Show (aka La Carpa). She followed that with work in various music departments as a composer's assistant, score production coordinator (The Bourne Supremacy, Horton Hears a Who!), music producer (TV's Fargo), and orchestrator (Kung Fu Panda 2, How to Train Your Dragon 2) throughout the 2000s and 2010s. In the meantime, she collected occasional composing credits on independent films like 2007's 3 Américas, 2012's Margarita, and 2015's Dope, which earned her a Black Reel Award nomination for Outstanding Original Score. Franco soon joined composer Michael Giacchino and songwriters Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez on the music team of the Disney-Pixar animated musical Coco, as songwriter and additional music composer alongside Adrián Molina. While the Lopezes won an Oscar for their contribution, "Remember Me," all five of them won an Annie Award for Outstanding Achievement for Music in a Feature Production.

With Franco's star on the rise, in 2018 she was the main composer for the Starz series Vida, in addition to other work for TV, and she provided scores for the comedy films Tag and Public Disturbance. Among her scoring output in 2019 was Dora and the Lost City of Gold, with composer John Debney. She followed that with music for the Curious George franchise, scores for the Netflix films Work It and The Sleepover, and continued work on the animated TV series The Casagrandes, which featured Franco's theme music. In 2021, she penned the score for the Disney animated feature Encanto, which featured songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda. Franco also performed her own keyboards and Latin and orchestral percussion on the score recording. ~ Marcy Donelson, Rovi