Biography

After passing his Ph. D. exams in anthropology and doing field work in China during the Cultural Revolution, Dan was recruited into the motion picture industry and mentored by his father Dan Carlin, Sr. Together, along with siblings Tom, Patty, and Kathy (Durning), and many other family members & friends, they built La Da Productions/Segue Music from a 3-person music-editing company into the largest independent film & television music-services organization in industry history. An Emmy-award winning music editor, Dan oversaw the expansion of the company into music supervision, and he also began working as an Emmy-nominated music director and conductor, studying with William Kettering. Upon Dan Sr.'s retirement in the early 1980s, Dan and his junior partner Jeff Carson continued to run the company until 2004, when Dan segued into full-time music education. A longtime advocate for industry workers, Dan served nearly 25 years on the AMPAS Music Branch Executive Committee, and has held multiple leadership positions in the (GRAMMY) Recording Academy, including two terms as Chairman of the Board. He also helped design, launch and fund the Composer's Lab at the Sundance Institute as well as the UCLA film-scoring program, initiated and funded the first internship program at Berklee College of Music, and taught courses in film music and music business for UCLA and Belmont University. After serving as Executive Director of the Henry Mancini Institute (2004 to 2007), Dan moved to Boston to take the position of Chair of Film Scoring at Berklee. In 2012, he returned to Los Angeles to head up the graduate film scoring program at University of Southern California's Thornton School of Music, where he also served as Vice Dean of the Contemporary Music Division for 2+ years before retiring from USC in 2022
- IMDb mini biography by: Daniel Allan Carlin

Brother of Tom Carlin, Patricia Carlin and Kathy Durning.

Son of Dan Carlin Sr..

Chair, Film Scoring Department, Berklee College of Music

Los Angeles, CA: Chair, Scoring for Motion Pictures & Television, Thornton School of Music, University of Southern California.

Vice Dean, Contemporary Music, USC (2018-2020).

Work hard, be nice, get lucky. In response to questions on the role of luck in building an industry career, I always refer to Samuel Goldwyn's quote: "The harder I work, the luckier I get."