Madeline Clara Cheng is a Taiwanese American composer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. As a Presidential Scholar at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, she studies composition with minors in business law and music industry.

Madeline is a 2023 YoungArts Award Winner, an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award finalist, and a recipient of the ICEBERG New Music and Lift Up Our Voices scholarships. An alumna of Missy Mazzoli and Ellen Reid's Luna Composition Lab and the Wildflower Composers Festival, she has been commissioned by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra's 150th anniversary May Festival, Ensemble for These Times, and the UUCWC Crossing Chorale.

Madeline’s compositions have also been performed by members of Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Norway’s Bergen International Festival, the International Contemporary Ensemble, Ensemble for These Times, the Boston New Music Initiative, and SOLI Chamber Ensemble. She is an alumna of the Tanglewood Institute, for which she received a full scholarship, as well as the Yellow Barn Young Artists Program.

When she’s not composing, Madeline can be found designing escape rooms, music directing a show, producing interdisciplinary arts events, enjoying improv comedy, or playing piano and saxophone—sometimes simultaneously.

Young Composer Residency Commissions:

“It Becomes Habit” premiered in March 2025 by La Caccina

Visit Madeline Clara Cheng’s Website