Conductor, composer, pianist, and soprano Yiran Zhao is Assistant Conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra starting with the 2026–27 season. She was a 2025 Conducting Fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center, and is currently a Rita E. Hauser Conducting Fellow at Curtis Institute of Music. She taught courses in Music Theory and Conducting at Eastman School of Music, where she served as assistant conductor of Eastman Musica Nova.

Published by Hinshaw Music Inc., Zhao was a national winner of the 2024 American Prize for Composition. She has held assistant conductor roles with the Civic Orchestra of New Haven and the Greater New Haven Community Chorus, in addition to serving as a church organist for the past five years. She was a conducting instructor at Yale, and she has performed as a conductor, pianist, and singer in the New Music New Haven series.

Zhao is a soprano in the Grammy®-winning Apollo’s Fire and The Crossing, and she was a VOCES8 US Scholar in 2023–24. She currently serves as staff pianist at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2026 she will make her conducting debut with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in a subscription concert shared with Music Director Andris Nelsons, and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra’s Mendelssohn Academy.

Zhao holds a Master of Music in Choral Conducting from Yale School of Music (Robert Shaw Prize recipient) and a Bachelor of Music in Piano and Theory & Composition from Westminster Choir College.