Timo Chen

Timo Chen is an Emmy-award winning Asian-American composer and multi-instrumentalist working often at the intersections of traditional, experimental, and world music. He has composed, arranged, and conducted music and additional music for the shows Why Women Kill (Paramount+), Samurai Rabbit (Netflix), Superstore (NBC), and The Thing About Harry (Freeform). His music is also featured in Universal’s Unfriended: Dark Web, Fox’s Series Lucifer, and PBS’s 62 Days.

Timo’s passion lies in stories from disenfranchised communities and working with filmmakers of those communities, particularly Asian-Americans. Following the 2014 Sundance Institute Composers Lab at Skywalker Ranch, Timo went on to score Jennifer Phang’s indie sci-fi Advantageous, which premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival and was acquired by Netflix. He continued to score independent and foreign films across the spectrum including Emily Ting’s, Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong and Go Back To China as well as Vietnamese films Kiss and Spell and Trung So (Jackpot), Vietnam’s 2016 Oscar submission for best foreign film.

In addition to marginalized narratives, Timo has also worked on important docuseries for KCET tackling complex issues of gentrification and climate change, City Rising, and Earth Focus, the latter of which he earned an Emmy. His latest documentary Who We Become was acquired by Ava DuVernay’s company, Array, and now streams on Netflix. Timo continues to work and reside in Los Angeles where his studio also functions as a lab with hand wired microphones, oscillators, and various altered instruments to create music with a unique sound in solid service of picture.