Conductor, composer, pianist, and soprano Yiran Zhao is pursuing a Doctor of Musical Arts in Conducting at Eastman School of Music. She holds a Master of Music in Choral Conducting from Yale School of Music and a Bachelor of Music in Piano and Theory & Composition from Westminster Choir College (summa cum laude). She was the assistant conductor of Civic Orchestra of New Haven, and Greater New Haven Community Chorus. Yiran was the recipient of the “Robert Shaw Prize” (for distinguished achievement), “Margot Fassler Prize in the Performance of Sacred Music”, and the “The Hugh Porter Scholarship” at Yale. She attended the Eastern Music Festival (with Gerard Schwarz) in 2024, the University of Oregon Orchestral Conducting workshop (with Neil Varon) in 2023, the Norfolk Summer Choral Conducting Workshop (with Simon Carrington) in 2022, and Illinois Bach Academy (with Andrew Megill) in 2021. She has performed as a conductor, pianist, and singer in the New Music New Haven series, and she participated in conducting masterclass with Masaaki Suzuki. 

An educator, Yiran is a course instructor for Music Theory and Conducting classes at Eastman. She was a music teacher at Educational Center for the Arts (magnet arts high school, ACES), a post-graduate teaching fellow at Yale Music in Schools Initiative (conductor of All-City Choir), and she was a conducting teacher at Yale and gave lessons to undergraduate and graduate students. An active composer, Yiran’s works have been widely performed at Yale, USC, Westminster, and in Europe and Asia. She was the organist at First Baptist Church in New Haven, and organist and choir director at Christ the King Lutheran Church in Kendall Park, NJ. A professional singer, she regularly sings with Apollo’s Fire, Yale Choral Artists, VAE Cincinnati, and she was a VOCES8 US Scholar in 2023–24.

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