Ted Hearne is an active composer, conductor and performer in New York and Chicago. He is the artistic director of Yes is a World, a nonprofit organization working to promote peace and social change through new music, composer-in-residence of the Chicago Children's Choir, and is thrilled to be conducting Red Light New Music in their fourth season.

Ted directed the premiere of David Lang's opera Anatomy Theatre and the UK production of The Carbon Copy Building, the Obie-winning comic book opera by Julia Wolfe, David Lang and Michael Gordon. He has worked with ICE, Ridge Theatre and Australia's Opera IHOS, conducted premieres by Beat Furrer, Fabien Levy, Anna Cylne and Jenny Olivia Johnson, and will be seen as music director of Michael Gordon's Lightning At Our Feet this December at BAM. He recently premiered the role of Justin in Jacob Cooper's Timberbrit.

Recent performances of music by Ted Hearne include premieres by Newspeak, and Charleston's New Music Collective, and upcoming events include a performance by the Minnesota Orchestra of his rousing Patriot, and premieres by Third Coast Percussion and the Red Light Ensemble. Ted's piece Katrina Ballads is an hour-long work for 16 musicians, setting entirely primary-source texts from the week following Hurricane Katrina. It premiered to rave reviews at the 2007 Piccolo Spoleto Festival in Charleston, and will be digitally released on New Amsterdam Records in August 2008 in remembrance of the third anniversary of the hurricane. Ted received his bachelor's degree from Manhattan School of Music, was a composition fellow at the 2004 Bang on a Can Summer Institute, and currently attends Yale School of Music.