Contact Info and Bios

Ted Shen is a musical theater composer and founder of The Ted & Mary Jo Shen Charitable Gift Fund, which he oversees with his wife, Mary Jo. After graduating from Yale University and Harvard Business School, he joined the investment bank Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, where he held a succession of executive positions over 30 years, including Chairman of the DLJ Capital Markets Group for his final 15 years. In 1999 he retired from finance to activate the Foundation's philanthropic mission and to pursue his passion for music, drawing on his jazz roots as a musician in his school years. Since then, he has composed four produced musicals, most recently We Shall Someday (with libretto by Harrison David Rivers), which has toured Southern cities to foster community dialogue and activism centered on racial justice—the driving narrative topic of the work.

Mary Jo Shen is a writer and co-executive director of The Ted & Mary Jo Shen Charitable Gift Fund. In that role, she has partnered with Ted in stewarding the Foundation's grants supporting over 150 musical theater productions and cast recordings, more than 50 new ballet works, and major initiatives including the Shen Musical Theater Curriculum at Yale University. As a writer and performer, she created and presented Paper Piano, a one-woman show, at Joe's Pub in 2017 and 2018. Her earlier career included five years in the advertising department of People magazine and 10 years as laboratory manager for genetics research at Harvard University and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.