MUSE • Musicians United for Social Equity

Biography

David Quang Pham is an award-winning composer-playwright, science communicator, and screenwriter in Washington Heights. Their musicals include Chemicals in the Water (2025 The Tank), Ellipses (2023 Theatre About Science Conference; 2023 Milky Way Theatre; 2022 O’Neill semifinalist), The Living Fossils (2025 The People’s Theatre unit finalist, 2025 Workshop Theater), Tour (2019 Downtown Urban Arts Festival finalist), Turnover: A New Leaf (2025 Queer Theatre Kalamazoo world premiere; 2024 The Tank; Best Book, Best Director: Aliyah Curry, Best Musical nomination – 2024 Philadelphia New Musicals Festival). His work has also been produced or developed by Musical Theatre Factory, Blessed Sacrament, Signature Theatre, Their Daughters Productions, Mayernik Media, with performances in Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, and Portugal. As a screenwriter, he studied under David N Weiss and Kimberly Barrante at Sundance Collab, adapting Ellipses and Turnover into The Galaxy Family and Photosynthesis. He is writing his first live-action series titled Banh MI, which follows the Dos, a Vietnamese American family, starting a musical restaurant called Do Banh Mi in Michigan. He plans to produce cultural and scientific films under Flavor Pictures. David is the 2024 Great Performances Fellowship Award recipient, 2022 Harriet Tubman Effect Institute composer, 2021 Playwrights Foundation fellow, and 2020 Working Title Playwrights apprentice.

David’s storytelling combines science and fantasy, whose coming-of-age themes focus on family dynamics, environmentalism, queerness, and immigration. His pentatonic music composition blends pop, punk, and Vietnamese folk elements to reflect his Eastern-Midwestern upbringing. Janelle Lawrence and Gonzalo Valencia-Peña mentor them, helping forge their musical styles from pop, punk, to Vietnamese folk. When not writing songs full of science puns, they play trombone in the Queer Big Apple Corps and Vietnamese zithers and bamboo flute for Mekong NYC. Be up to lightspeed at sciencetheatre.us and @sciencetheatre.