MUSE • Musicians United for Social Equity

Biography

Andy Li is an Arizona-born Chinese American composer for theatre, opera, and media based in New York City. His short opera Tesserae (lib. Patrick Thompson), written for The American Opera Project, recently premiered at the Hudson Guild Theatre and NYU Shubert Theatre. His other works have been performed at The African Grove Theatre and Joe’s Pub. For film, he has composed original scores for two short documentaries: Blank Canvas (dir. Xuecong Zhao), a semi-finalist at the 2020 Student Academy Awards, and Her Summer (dir. Yunye Chen).

He is currently working on his original musical The Garden Bridge (lib. Jill Ohayon), which was workshopped at The BringAbout with Jennifer Jancuska, Resident Choreographer of Hamilton on Broadway, and will be developed in April 2025 at the Casa Uno Artist Residency in Atenas, Costa Rica. It was a finalist for the Aubrey and Marla Dan Fund for New Musicals and the Lab Series at the Manhattan School of Music, and one of nine semifinalists for the 2024 CreateTheater Musical Series. He was selected as one of two winners of the 2025 GCNA Franco Proposal Contest, which commissions pieces for solo carillon that will premiere at the 2025 GCNA Congress.

Li holds an MFA from the Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program (NYU), a BM in Music for New Media (Peabody Institute), and BA degrees in French and Medicine, Science, and the Humanities (Johns Hopkins University). His composition teachers include Matthew Sklar (The Prom, Elf the Musical, The Wedding Singer), Thomas Dolby, Christopher Kennedy, Vid Smooke, Martyn Harry, and Travis Hardaway. He is a member of ASCAP, the Dramatists Guild, and MUSE.