Heidi Chan creates music and sound for theatre, dance, and other media. Over the past 2 decades, she has had a versatile career, from performing with Canada’s preeminent Japanese taiko drumming group Nagata Shachu, working as a sound editor in the studio of acclaimed Hong Kong director Johnny To, to touring across Asia and Russia with UK’s Shakespeare’s Globe.
As a musician, Heidi plays Japanese and Chinese bamboo flutes, percussion, modular synthesizers, and sometimes builds her own experimental instruments. Currently a member of Japanese folk ensemble ten ten, her musical output spans from East Asian traditional music compositions and arrangements to experimental electroacoustic soundscapes. She collaborates frequently with musicians from other cultural traditions and disciplines, and has performed in a number of experimental music and performance series in Toronto, including Track Could Bend, Exit Points, X Avant (Music Gallery), the 416 Toronto Creative Improvisers Festival, and CoexisDance.
In theatre, Heidi has participated in productions for Outside The March, Soulpepper, Obsidian Theatre, Shaw Festival, Factory Theatre, Buddies in Bad Times, Theatre Gargantua, Blyth Festival, Nightwood Theatre, as well as dance productions by Little Pear Garden, Zata Omm, Aeris Körpor, and Moonhorse Dance. In Hong Kong, she has worked with Tang Shu Wing Theatre Studio, as a live musician for his groundbreaking, minimalist production Titus Andronicus 2.0, which toured to Singapore, Beijing, Poland, and Norway. Heidi was also a part of the company’s historic participation in Shakespeare’s Globe’s World Shakespeare Festival as part of London’s Cultural Olympiad in 2012, the first ever Cantonese company to perform on the Globe stage. In 2011, Heidi produced and directed Hong Kong’s first ever local Japanese taiko drumming concert, Convergence, with Hong Kong’s all-female local taiko group, O•Daiko.
Heidi received a Dora Mavor Moore Award in 2026 for her sound design work (with Chris Pereira) in Makram Ayache’s acclaimed production of The Green Line (In Arms Theatre, Factory Theatre, Buddies in Bad Times).
