Jonathan Weiss is a composer, pianist, and teacher based in New Haven, CT. When he was seven, his mom gave him a Casio piano keyboard for Christmas, and he couldn’t stop teaching himself tunes by ear and creating ideas of his own. Since then, his passion for musical discovery has carried him through many adventures.

In 2020, Weiss won an ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composer Award. His compositions have been performed at venues including The Green Room 42, the Atlantic Music Festival, Boston Conservatory at Berklee, and a masterclass with the violinist Hilary Hahn.

Weiss graduated with a B.A. in Music, summa cum laude, from Yale College, where he studied piano and composition under Kathryn Alexander, Nathan Roberts, Konrad Kaczmarek, Jade Conlee, Howard Frazin, and Jeanine Tesori. He has worked closely with musicians including Jennifer Beattie, Krista River, Jacqueline Kaskel, Sophie Dvorak, Phoebe Liu, Anna Zhong, Epongue Ekille, Jacob Miller, David Leach and Julia Connor, and Sharon Ahn.

While Weiss’s work ranges in style, it is unified by a voice that is at once confident and vulnerable. In 2023, he composed the soundtrack for Jeffrey Steele’s Yale College Arts production of Black N Blue Boys / Broken Men, about young men who collectively process their severe traumas. Passionate about connecting to young people with disabilities, he serves as a volunteer composer for Hear Your Song and taught piano to his older brother, Luke, who has multiple profound physical and developmental disabilities.

In 2023, Weiss was chosen as an inaugural recipient of the Chauncey Fellowship, a program of the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven for college graduates with artistic and service-oriented goals. Through the Fellowship, he is composing an original opera, offering music lessons in the community, and serving as a pianist and a chorister for Bethesda Lutheran Church and as the music director of Yale Taizé. In February 2025, he released his debut album, OH VASTNESS.