It’s great to meet you — thanks for checking out my work!
Some (hopefully) fun facts about me:
- I use he/him and they/them pronouns interchangeably.
- I have double-jointed elbows. (Yes, they’re weird.)
- I’ll never say no to a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice.
- I’m forever a Mario and Zelda video game nerd.
- My (not so) guilty pleasure band has been ABBA since I was 3.
- I also love trying new food! Please send recs.
Ian Chan is a Hong Kong-born Canadian composer, orchestrator, music director, and multi-oriented learner.
Splitting time between the Toronto, Boston, and New York metro areas, Ian is drawn to art that explores the intersection between creative communication and equitable representation. He’s interested in the stories we use to relate with one another, and how these are mediated by identity and culture. Through their work, Ian hopes to:
- stress the necessity of celebrating underrepresented voices in the arts;
- remind us of art-making’s ability to build and heal communities; and
- contribute to multidisciplinary discourse in a world that is becoming increasingly stratified.
Ian is currently the music assistant for the upcoming Broadway revival of 1776 directed by Diane Paulus and Jeffrey L. Page, having recently served in that role in its leg at the American Repertory Theater. He was also a music assistant and rehearsal pianist on the A.R.T.’s production of WILD: A Musical Becoming. as well as orchestrator, arranger, and music director for the theater’s family musicals Jack and the Beanstalk: A Musical Adventure and Thumbelina: A Little Musical. They continue music assistant work on the Paramount+ show Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies.
As a musical theatre composer, Ian’s work has been performed across North America. His first full-length musical, Cruising Altitude, was premiered by the Office for the Arts at Harvard in 2019; since then, their work has been produced by the Musical Stage Company, Playdate Theatre, Bravo Academy, among other groups. In spring 2022, Ian’s new musicals The More You Know and Miss You ‘Til Tomorrow, written with collaborators Chloe E.W. Levine and Isabella Cesari, respectively, premiered in Boston and Toronto. Ian also writes concert music, performed by groups like the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum, Scarborough Philharmonic Orchestra, Etobicoke Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Sneak Peek Orchestra.
When they’re not in the writing or rehearsal room, Ian consistently advocates for Asian and LGBTQ+ representation in arts and media; they have interned at the Center for Asian American Media and were a researcher on the Discovery series Book of Queer. Ian is a rising senior at Harvard University, where they study linguistics and mathematics.
Ian Chan 