Timo Chen is an Emmy-award winning composer and multi-instrumentalist working often in the intersections of traditional, experimental, and world music. He is a long-time collaborator with Grammy-award winning composer Mateo Messina engaging in a wide range of projects and situations from conductor, arranger, and additional music for the CBS All-Access anthology series Why Women Kill, to additional music and score producer for the NBC comedy Superstore, and co-composer for the 2020 romantic comedy The Thing About Harry for Freeform. His music is also prominently featured in Universal’s Unfriended: Dark Web, Fox’s Series Lucifer, and PBS’s 62 Days.

Timo has a passion for stories from disenfranchised communities and working with filmmakers of those communities, particularly Asian-Americans. Following a two-week fellowship at Skywalker Ranch for the 2014 Sundance Institute Composers Lab, 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 on to score a number of 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 which was also acquired by Netflix. In addition to marginalized stories, Timo has also worked on important KCET docuseries on complex topics of gentrification and climate change, City Rising, and Earth Focus.

Timo’s musical journey began in Los Angeles, where he grew up attending the USC Community School of Performing Arts (now the Colburn School) and continued at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music studying Composition, Piano, and Music Technology. He lived in Asia for several years studying Balinese Gamelan and Peking Opera while working as a session and touring guitarist and music director for Chinese pop artists Sandee Chan, Alex To, and Coco Lee. Timo further continued his conducting studies in 2018 when he was chosen as a fellow for the BMI Conducting Workshop in 2018 led by Grammy-award winning conductor Lucas Richman. Timo continues to work in Los Angeles where his studio also functions as a lab with hand-wired microphones, oscillators, and all sorts of altered instruments to serve his pursuits and passion of creating music with a unique sound for solid narratives to picture.