Bio

Ryan Lester is an internationally performed composer for film, interactive multimedia, television and more.

Featured work

His most recent interactive multimedia work includes music for the VR art installation The Infinite Library at Goethe Institute, which is currently on an international tour through Asia and Europe.

Recent films scored include Mika Johnson’s indie feature Confessions of a Boxman starring Marek Zelinka, and the short film Resolutions: a commercial for Franz Kafka.

Solo artwork of his includes an ongoing project of pop-up concerts inspired by the behavior of water.

In the realm of TV, his celebrity walk-on music has been used on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Trevor Noah for ten years. He composed the theme music for The Fake News with Ted Nelms, starring Ed Helms and winner of the 2019 Writer’s Guild Award for Outstanding Comedy Variety Special.

Other work

Ryan is a frequent collaborator in Hollywood, working as either a programmer, orchestrator, or conductor on such projects as NBC’s Crossbones, starring John Malkovich, The Harley and The Davidsons (3-part mini-series for The Discovery Channel), and CBS’s Why Women Kill, starring Lucy Liu, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, and Ginnifer Goodwin. Other commercial successes have included music placements on Dateline, 20/20, and commercials for Coca-Cola, Dominos, and the Helsinki City Museum.

Education

Ryan studied music composition at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music (B.M. 2011), and conducting at the Juilliard School, Evening Division (2013-14). Ryan was selected to participate in BMI's Composing for the Screen year-long mentorship program (2012) and ASCAP’s Columbia Film Scoring Workshop (2013). His Composition teachers have included Josh Levine, David Lang, Liza Lim, Wendell Logan, David Noon, Lewis Nielson, Ken Hesketh and Alison Kay; film scoring studies with Rick Baitz, John Lissauer, Scott Gordon, and Miguel Mera.