Haotian Yu (b. 1998 in Shanghai, China; lives and works in Berlin, Germany) is a Canadian composer. His music constructs formal systems from speculative analyses of traditional Chinese music and related social practices.

Haotian Yu studied at the HfMDK Frankfurt (with support from the DAAD Postgraduate Scholarship) and the Eastman School of Music (with support from the Lois S. Rogers full scholarship), with Orm Finnendahl, Michael Reudenbach, Oliver Schneller, and Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon, among others. Additional studies include important exchanges and/or seminars with Mark Andre, Annesley Black, Stefano Gervasoni, George Lewis, Liza Lim, Sarah Nemtsov, Stefan Prins, and Rolf Wallin, among others, in Darmstadt, St. Petersburg, Toronto, etc. and formative early private studies with Brian Cherney and Steven Gellman.

Collaborators for recent and upcoming projects include ensemble mosaik (Berlin), Freesound (Toronto), Divertimento Ensemble (Milan), members of IEMA (Frankfurt), Ensemble Fons (Essen), AIR contemporary music collective (Beijing), Jaume Darbra Fa (Murcia/Cologne), Michael Murphy (Toronto/Freiburg) and Adam Woodward and Lukas Nowok (ensemble recherche, Freiburg). He was artist in residence at the Akademie der Künste Berlin from 2022-2023 as a recipient of the Berlin Fellowship, is the recipient of eight SOCAN Foundation Young Composer Awards (including the 2023 Grand Prize), and has been twice included in the Canadian Section submission to the ISCM World Music Days.

Also active in new music administration and curation, he is artistic director of the Beijing-based AIR contemporary music collective (since 2018) and served as president for Eastman’s student-run new music organization, OSSIA New Music. He regularly publishes educational writing and media on new music through AIR; additionally, his scholarly writings (on the intersections of new music and accelerationism, phenomenology, and social systems theory) have been broadcast on SWR and published in Perspectives of New Music.