CHAR, Jessie

Jessie Char is an American composer, cellist, sound designer, producer, and multidisciplinary artist based in New York City. Classically trained as a cellist, she began performing professionally at a young age and later developed a career spanning music, technology, design, theatre, film, and interactive media. Her current compositional work is concentrated particularly in theatre, film, and games. Maestra
As a young cellist, Char was a Seattle Symphony Gold Medalist in 2002, performed at Carnegie Hall with the Tacoma Youth Symphony in 2005, and later worked as a substitute cellist with the Yakima Symphony Orchestra. She has continued to perform as a cellist alongside her work as a composer and sound designer; in 2023 she appeared as a cellist in the HBO series Succession. jessiechar.com
Char spent nearly two decades working in technology and design, including a period at Apple, before shifting her professional focus increasingly toward music and theatrical design. She later founded the Layers design conference, which ran alongside Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference from 2015 to 2020. Her combined background in classical music, technology, and design has become an important feature of her approach to electronic music and sound design. BroadwayWorld
Her theatre work includes sound design and original music for productions such as JOB and Invasive Species. For Invasive Species, produced Off-Broadway at the Vineyard Theatre in 2024, Char and Maxwell Neely-Cohen created sound design and music. Their collaborative work encompasses theatre, film, video games, literature, and dance. BroadwayWorld
Char has also composed original film and game music. Her credits include the scores for the short films Ana (2023) and Radishes (2025/26), as well as original music for the game Tanghulu (2023). Her professional profile also lists expertise in incidental music, electronic/computer music, music production, and film scoring.