RICHARD's BIO
Richard Wang is a Brazilian composer, arranger, conductor and multi-instrumentalist who was born in Munich, Germany. At the age of five, he began taking piano and violin lessons. When he was around ten years old, he started learning the acoustic guitar. After learning the acoustic guitar, he then went on to learn electric guitar.
By the age of 12, Richard started focusing on classical and electric guitar. He was part of multiple bands in his teens, and he played at a number of venues with them, including the legendary Circo Voador in Rio de Janeiro. As a result of his studies, he applied and was accepted to a music college in Rio de Janeiro where he studied classical guitar with Nicolas de Souza Barros. In a period of one and a half year studying there, he won 1st prize in two classical guitar competitions; the first time in the regional competition in Rio de Janeiro, XIII Seleção de Novos Talentos AV Rio, and the second time in a national competition Concurso Fred Schneiter, which was also held in Rio. As a result from the 1st prize at the AV Rio competition, Richard performed at the national broadcasting TV Show called "Partituras" aired in 2016 on TV Brasil, EBC.
Aside from playing guitar, he worked on a project with the filmmaker Sylvestre Campe, where he scored part of an episode of his documentary “Mission: Antarctic,” which aired on another Brazilian nationwide broadcasted channel OFF.
When he was 19 he decided that he wanted to be a composer. This decision was followed by the decision to change his main instrument back to the piano. During this period, he lived in Vienna, Austria and Munich, Germany. In Austria, he met another filmmaker, Badri Skhirtladze and scored two scenes for his short film The Green Key.
During this time, he applied to many Universities and got accepted to the Universities of Munich, Hamburg, Bremen, and Berklee College of Music in Boston. He spent one semester in Munich and then decided to transfer to Berklee in Boston. He then moved to Boston to attend the Berklee College of Music.
At Berklee, he tested out of a number of classes, which allowed him to start the Dual Major Film Scoring/CWP (Contemporary Writing and Production) fairly early. He has attended various Film Scoring events and met some of the most successful composers of the film industry, such as Pinar Toprak, Christopher Young, Ramin Djawadi, Harry Gregson Williams and Michael Giacchino. At school he scored a short film called "Joan In Love" by Leilani Reyes (LMU). And, as a result of his academic effort, he was on the Dean’s List for five consecutive semesters, with a GPA of 4.0 in his first semester.
In 2020 he scored an award winning short film called "The Binding of Itzik" by Anika Benkov. And in his senior year he worked as the arranger for Dou Dou's debut album "Monologue", 2021. He was also the main composer of the video game "Illum" released by Private Void Studio, 2021.
He received the Award for Creativity in Commercial Writing from the CWP department at Berklee, and was also granted the Berklee Achievement Scholarship while attending the school. He graduated with the highest honors (Summa Cum Laude) from Berklee in 2021.
In 2022 he was one of the select few to arrange for the commencement concert of his year. He arranged and conducted James Newton Howard's piece "Harvey Two Face" for the movie "The Dark Knight", 2008, and conducted his arrangement at the Agganis Arena in Boston for an audience of over 2,000 people, including James Newton Howard himself. The composer briefly complemented Richard Wang by saying "great conducting".
Also in 2022 he moved to Los Angeles, CA, to pursue his dream of writing music for films and television. A few months after moving in he started working at the world renowned music company Bleeding Fingers co-founded by today's biggest and most influential film composer, Hans Zimmer. At Bleeding Fingers he worked with Anže Rozman on Prehistoric Planet II, Primeri Inspektorja Vrenka, and Camila Cabello's single "Take Me Back Home" for the BBC series "Frozen Planet II".
Later in 2022, he moved to Jacob Shea's team, who is the senior most composer at the company and is the composer for groundbreaking nature-documentary Planet Earth II, BBC. While working there he was promoted to Junior Composer for Bleeding Fingers under Sony Music Publishing LLC. While with Jacob Shea, he worked on the biggest show produced by Bleeding Fingers in 2023, Planet Earth III for BBC, which features Dan Smith from Bastille on vocals. He also composed music for a variety of TV Shows, such as Mountain Men Season 12 and Welcome to Plathville Season 5. Richard also has a number of tracks published by Extreme Music, some of which have been played on the radio.