Bio
Jonathon Cox is a composer and songwriter living in Dayton, Ohio. He has written music for short films, features, stage and other forms of media.
Jonathon comes from a musical family and began playing music at an early age. He picked up a set of drum sticks and taught himself to play the set by copying his older brother. Over the next few years, his natural affinity for percussion lent itself to other instruments. He bought a neighbors’ old Charvel bass guitar for $10 and used it to teach himself while playing along with his favorite bands, namely Nirvana and Metallica. Inspired by Eric Clapton’s 1992 album, Unplugged, Jonathon took up his grandfathers’ hollow body Gibson electric guitar and managed to figure out how to make it work.
Jonathon formed a rock band during his sophomore year of high school with a few of his friends and began learning how to write songs. His fascination with songwriting carried him through high school and into college. He entered Ohio Northern University as a music composition major in 1997, studying under Dr. Sunny Zank and Rosemary Williams.
The next 4 years saw a dramatic change in Jonathon’s writing style. He began writing small instrumental and choral works and developed a growing interest in electronic music.
After graduation, Jonathon applied for and was accepted to Ohio University’s Master’s of Music Composition program, where he was a graduate assistant to Dr. Mark Phillips.
& Jonathon Cox
Film music had been Jonathon’s passion for a very long time. One of the deciding factors in him attending OU was the fact that they had a very well respected film program. Immediately upon arrival in Athens, Ohio, Jonathon introduced himself to the head of the film program, stating, “I’m here to write film music!”
Jonathon has been working on independent films ever since. He scored Jeff Yanik’s (The Avengers, Rise of the Planet of the Apes) film festival favorite and award winning short Murder at Midnight in 2003 and an anthology horror feature film called Death4Told, starring Margot Kidder (Superman) and Tom Savini (Dawn of the Dead, Django Unchained) in 2004. In 2008, Jonathon scored Robert X. Golphin’s (The Great Debaters) short, Beautiful Man in the Buff, directed by Ziahd Hussien. 2010 saw Jonathon team up with Jeff Yanik again, this time on a retelling of the Edgar Allen Poe Classic The Tell-Tale Heart. The post-apocalyptic romantic comedy feature, Dating a Zombie, written a directed by Jack Abele (Death of the Dead), was completed in 2012 and a second feature team up, Future Stakes was finished in 2014. A unique and ambitious Steampunk web series called Marley’s Ghost: Ambassadors of Steam by writer-director Rob Stilfield came along in 2016. Jonathon’s latest project, in 2020, was a film called Weekend Warriors starring Jason London (Dazed and Confused) and Corbin Bernsen (Major League, Psych) and directed by Ritchie Greer.