A versatile and well-respected American film composer, Theodore Shapiro is one of the industry's most in-demand suppliers of comedy scores, though he has also worked extensively in action, drama, documentary, and television. Starting in the early-2000s, he became the musical voice for numerous hit comedies including Old School, The Devil Wears Prada, Tropic Thunder, Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, and Blades of Glory. As his career progressed, Shapiro developed ongoing collaborative relationships with several leading directors, notably Ben Stiller, Paul Feig, and Jay Roach. His work with Stiller has been particularly well-received with 2013's The Secret Life of Walter Mitty earning several International Film Music Critics Association (IFMCA) award nominations and his score for 2022's Severance television series winning an Emmy Award.

Theodore Michael Shapiro was born on September 29, 1971, in Washington, D.C., and earned a B.A. in music from Brown University, then a masters from the Juilliard School of Music. After scoring episodes of MTV's popular sketch series The State, he shifted to film work, composing the soundtrack to crime dramas like Hurricane Streets and Six Ways To Sunday and the 1999 boxing documentary On the Ropes. At the start of the 21st century, Shapiro began to work more prolifically, finding his groove in the comedy genre. He worked on a pair of David Mamet films (State and Main and Heist) and scored the cult classic 2001 comedy Wet Hot American Summer. As the decade wore on, he became the go-to composer for comedies starring many of the leading comic actors of the era like Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughn, Ben Stiller, Luke Wilson, an Owen Wilson. Some of Shapiro's best known scores from this period include Old School (2003), Along Came Polly, Starsky & Hutch, 13 Going on 30; and Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story (all from 2004). By the latter half of the decade, he was one of Hollywood's busiest composers, scoring popular films like The Devil Wears Prada, You, Me and Dupree, Idiocracy, Blades of Glory, Semi-Pro, and Marley & Me Because so many of his films were comedies, Shapiro was often called upon to write pastiche music -- send-ups, in effect, of conventional movie music, and with his extensive knowledge of movie history, he did this well, notably in his music for Ben Stiller's Tropic Thunder, his first of several projects with Stiller acting as director.

In the 2010s, Shapiro had worked with enough directors that he had established a working relationship with several of them. He did several projects for Jay Roach including the 2012 political drama Game Change and the 2019 drama Bombshell. He also deepened his collaboration with Stiller, composing the music for the 2013 hit The Secret Life of Walter Mitty which earned the composer several IFMCA award nominations. He later developed a relationship with comedy director Paul Feig and went on to score several of his films including Spy (2015), Ghostbusters (2016), and Last Christmas (2019).

In the 2020s Shapiro added more animated features to his resume including the popular Trolls series. Returning to television work, he scored the pilot for the popular thriller Yellowjackets, then teamed up again with Stiller for the hit science fiction series Severance. Shapiro's eerie theme for Severance became one of his most recognizable works and won him a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Music Composition for a Series. Two more scores for Feig followed, Jackpot! (2023) and Another Simple Favor (2025), as well as the second season of Severance. ~ Timothy Monger & William Ruhlmann