MUSE • Musicians United for Social Equity

Biography

Ian Chan (he/they) is a Hong Kong-born Canadian composer, orchestrator, arranger, and music director. 

Most recently, Ian was the music assistant and rehearsal pianist on the Broadway revival of 1776, having recently served in the same role on its leg at the American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.). Before that, he was the music assistant and rehearsal pianist on the A.R.T.’s production of WILD: A Musical Becoming, and worked there on Jack and the Beanstalk: A Musical Adventure and Thumbelina: A Little Musical (both written by Julia Riew) as orchestrator, arranger, and music director. They were also currently a music assistant on Paramount+’s TV series 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 2022, Ian’s 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. Their most recent work, OUT: An Asian American Musical, was produced by the Harvard College Asian Student Arts Project (for which they were an inaugural board member) in April 2023. 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 interned at the Center for Asian American Media and was a researcher on Discovery+’s Book of Queer. Ian holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Harvard University, where he graduated with highest honors in Linguistics and received the Louis Sudler Prize in the Arts.