Kristen Anderson-Lopez

Kristen Anderson-Lopez (born March 21, 1972) is an American songwriter. Anderson-Lopez, along with her husband Robert Lopez and Henry Jackman, wrote and produced music for the 2011 Disney film Winnie the Pooh, for which they were nominated for an Annie Award for Best Music in a Feature Production. She also provided the voice of Kanga in the film. Additionally, she wrote songs for a Walt Disney World production of Finding Nemo – The Musical. She and her husband also wrote the songs for Disney's Frozen including "Let It Go", for which they won the Academy Award for Best Original Song at the 86th Academy Awards and two Grammy Awards at the 57th Annual Grammy Awards.

Anderson-Lopez is the co-creator of the musical In Transit, developed at the O’Neill Musical Theatre Conference. The musical ran Off-Broadway at the 59E59 Theatre, from September 21, 2010 to October 30, 2010. The production received the 2011 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Ensemble, as well as a nomination for the 2011 Lucille Lortel Award, Outstanding Musical (among others) and the 2011 Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Off-Broadway Musical. It opened on Broadway at the Circle in the Square Theatre in November 2016, directed and choreographed by Kathleen Marshall.

She co-created the romantic stage musical Up Here with her husband and Alex Timbers.

Her work for young audiences includes numerous short and full-length musical adaptations for Theatreworks USA (Diary of a Worm, Fancy Nancy, Condensed Classics). She has written several songs for television and was a staff writer for the award-winning children’s show, Wonder Pets, on Nick Jr.

As of February 2016, Anderson-Lopez is working with her husband on the Disney Theatrical Productions stage musical adaptation of Frozen, with Jennifer Lee writing the book.

Personal life
Anderson-Lopez was raised in three different places: Croton-on-Hudson, New York (a suburb of New York City), to 1986; the Myers Park neighborhood of Charlotte, North Carolina, from 1986 to 1990; and Waxhaw, North Carolina (a suburb of Charlotte), from 1990 onward (which served as her home base during her college years). Her parents, Erin and John, still live in Waxhaw. According to her father, Anderson-Lopez first fell in love with the theater at the age of four, when he took her to see a U.S. Bicentennial musical tribute staged in their then-hometown of Croton-on-Hudson. After her family moved to North Carolina, she attended and graduated from Charlotte Country Day School. She went on to Williams College in western Massachusetts, where she double-majored in drama and psychology and graduated in 1994. After a theater internship in Florida, Anderson-Lopez spent several years working temporary jobs while pursuing her dream of becoming a Broadway theatre performer in New York City. In 1999, she entered the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop and found her true calling as a lyricist, and also met her future husband Robert Lopez.

In October 2003, Anderson married Lopez, who would go on to become an EGOT-winning songwriter, composer and lyricist, including three Tony Awards for Avenue Q and The Book of Mormon. They have two daughters; Katie and Annie, who both had voice parts in Frozen.