Skip to content

Travis Yoon

Travis Min-jun Yoon was a Korean American violinist and composer from Evanston, Illinois, who attended the Juilliard School. He was Ezra Cruz’s roommate during the 2024–2025 academic year and became his romantic partner. Travis was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia in December 2024 and died at age twenty after a relapse in August 2025.

Early Life and Family

Travis was born in 2004 and grew up in Evanston with his parents, Sung-ho and Eun-joo, and his sister, Hana, who was approximately four years younger. Sung-ho worked as an engineer and Eun-joo as a nurse. Both supported Travis’s musical training, and Sung-ho’s long hours helped fund private lessons and, later, Juilliard. The household often expressed affection through provision, practical work, food, and dependable presence.

Sung-ho and Eun-joo chose Min-jun (민준, 敏俊) as his Korean given name with input from his paternal grandmother, Soon-ja, rather than through a formal ‘’dollimja’‘, or generational-syllable, tradition. The hanja associated his name with perceptiveness and intelligence (敏) and outstanding talent (俊). Min-jun became his legal middle name, and his Korean name was 윤민준 (Yoon Min-jun). Travis was his birth first name and the name he used socially and professionally. He was fluent in Korean and spoke it with his parents and grandparents. He could argue with Eun-joo, discuss his grandfather’s garden, and think in Korean when English felt too blunt or imprecise. At Juilliard, he sometimes felt the absence of people who knew that part of his daily life.

When Travis was sick as a child, Eun-joo made juk for him. She remained his primary caregiver during treatment in Evanston.

Hana regularly sent Travis photographs of sea creatures while he was at Juilliard and during his illness, including jellyfish, octopuses, and deep-sea anglerfish. He saved every photograph. His camera roll also contained pictures of sheet music, coffee cups, and one private photograph of Ezra asleep with one shoe on and his leather jacket still zipped. His paternal grandmother, Soon-ja Yoon, lived in the Yoon family home. She made him a quilt after noticing his difficulty staying warm before his leukemia diagnosis, brought her own juk during induction, adjusted her cooking during treatment in Evanston, and was present when he died.

Hana also sought Travis’s advice on clothing and accessories. Their calls while she got ready included affectionate teasing and disagreements about what she should wear; she valued his opinion without always following it.

Travis’s grandparents cried when he was accepted to Juilliard. His admission carried both the immediate joy of his achievement and the weight his family placed on the years of work that had made it possible.

Travis began classical violin training when he was young and studied with private instructors. At fourteen, he taught himself classical guitar. The guitar remained more private than the violin, an instrument he played for himself rather than juries or recitals, and his Juilliard peers were surprised when they discovered how well he played. He began composing in his mid-teens and gravitated toward string quartets and chamber music, where each voice depended on listening and response rather than a single performer carrying the work alone.

Physical Appearance and Presentation

Travis stood about 5‘7” and had a slight, fine-boned build. He wore his straight, silky hair long enough to brush his ears and nape, usually loose. For practice, he kept it back with soft bandanas in muted solids or understated patterns. He wore glasses and often pushed them back or adjusted his hair while thinking. Away from his violin, he worried at a thumbnail or cuticle; during performance, that restless motion narrowed into the exact control of his hands. His long, narrow fingers and smaller palms were strong and trained rather than fragile. His hands were usually smooth and slightly cool, with visible but carefully maintained calluses on his left fingertips.

Travis had a lean oval face with high cheekbones that were palpable rather than dramatic, a gently tapered jaw, and a nose with a softer rounded tip. His skin was light with a warm-neutral undertone. His warm medium-brown eyes were longer horizontally than tall, with a soft upper-lid crease and inner-corner fold; straight, naturally full brows gave the rest of his face structure. His smile came tentatively, as though asking permission to exist. When he felt safe, his cheeks softened and his eyes crinkled at the outer corners rather than opening into a showy, toothy grin.

Travis favored comfortable, tapered layers in muted neutrals, navy, ink, and worn denim. Fine-gauge cardigans and scarves gave him warmth without bulk. His scarves included lightweight woven cotton for ordinary days, soft knits for cold weather, and occasional silkier pieces, all within the same restrained palette. He rotated low-profile sneakers and loafers by occasion, while socks and slide-on house shoes were his usual dorm footwear. He carried scores and everyday supplies in a washed-canvas messenger bag and kept his jewelry unobtrusive: a fine silver chain under his shirt and small silver studs. These ordinary habits also kept early physical changes from becoming immediately legible to friends.

Personality

Travis consistently noticed beauty in details that set one thing apart from the others. He chose flowers with bent petals because he considered them the most beautiful and picked out pink rocks among slate-colored stones. The same attention extended to people: he noticed what made someone particular without treating difference as a defect to be corrected. Brooke and Aditi especially loved this about him.

He was quiet without being passive or empty. Travis listened with sustained attention, remembered small details, and acted on what he learned without announcing it. He noticed that Ezra threw his stress ball in groups of seven, that Sarah chewed her pen cap during Schenkerian analysis, and that Professor Eun-Ji’s left hand trembled before a demonstration and steadied when her bow met the string. He remembered personal news after other people had moved on from a conversation and checked back later. His care was practical and consistent: showing up, bringing food, stocking something a friend used, or making it easier for another person to rest.

Travis had a dry, self-deprecating sense of humor. He usually delivered a joke under his breath to one person, with a small almost-smile, and let the observation land without drawing the room toward him. During his illness, the almost-smile became more common because a full smile required energy he did not always have. He could also be demanding, petty, jealous, amused, angry, bored, frightened, and wrong. His quietness did not make him endlessly patient or morally uncomplicated.

He often minimized his own needs. Travis sat on the floor when chairs were available, deferred in conversations, ate small portions without calling attention to them, and spoke softly enough not to interrupt. He privately believed that many people tolerated him rather than actively wanted him, which made invitations difficult to trust and requests for help feel like impositions. Pain became “fine,” exhaustion became “just tired,” and nausea became his stomach “being weird.” These habits shaped how he described what he felt; they did not cause his leukemia or determine its outcome.

Beneath his contained social presentation, Travis was deeply emotional. He cried at ‘’Titanic’‘, loved sad romances, and believed in love stories, happy endings, and grand gestures while rarely expecting any of them to be directed toward him. Music gave those feelings more room than conversation did. His compositions could carry intensity that people who knew only his quiet public manner did not expect.

Travis enjoyed fashion and had developed his own taste in clothing and accessories before meeting Ezra. He considered how pieces worked together, including combinations whose asymmetry appealed to him.

Travis understood music as a form of listening: to other voices, to the space between sounds, and to what could not yet be said directly. The same principle shaped his friendships. He believed in showing up through accumulated acts rather than requiring care to arrive as a declaration.

Juilliard and Music

In summer 2023, before his first year at Juilliard, Travis acquired a Space Gray 14-inch MacBook Pro and used Sibelius for notation, composition, and coursework. He referred to the computer as his MacBook and did not give it a personal name.

Travis entered Juilliard in fall 2023 as a violinist and composer. He arrived early to ensemble rehearsals, learned how the other parts fit around his own, and offered composition notes precise enough that classmates often used them without fully registering where the solution had come from. His playing favored phrase architecture, attention to the ensemble, and service to the piece over display. His compositions paired harmonic sophistication with emotional restraint.

Rowan Collins, then a third-year violin-performance student, became his mentor and close friend during his first semester. She stayed late to work with him, rearranged her practice schedule, and discussed bowings and tempos with him in the residence hall. His compositions included chamber music and work based on Korean folk melodies associated with Gyeonggi Province that Soon-ja had hummed.

Faculty recognized Travis as more than an unusually accomplished violinist. He could hear structural relationships among incomplete musical fragments and join them into coherent phrases, often finding the hinge between ideas other students treated as unrelated. He sometimes began this work idly, arranging scraps of notation until a composition had formed before he named it as one.

Professor Eun-Ji recognized both his technical ability and the depth of his attention. She assigned him the Sibelius violin concerto because its cadenza demanded rigorous preparation while still sounding spontaneous. At his fall jury in December 2024, Travis’s cold, trembling hands failed him during the performance. Eun-Ji initially interpreted what she saw as nerves and understood the moment differently only after the withdrawal paperwork reached Juilliard. The cadenza remained unperformed.

Travis composed in the margins of his schedule, including late nights, early mornings, and the spaces between other obligations. He also listened closely to Ezra’s work through their shared wall. His observation, “If the second violin wants to lead, let it lead,” gave Ezra a structural answer that Ezra had not heard for himself.

Travis had shared music publicly since high school through his Instagram account and SoundCloud. The Instagram archive reached 214 posts by August 2025 and included violin performances, composition excerpts, score photographs, works in progress, and selected personal photographs. He did not treat the account as a formal commercial brand, but it brought occasional paid opportunities and allowed other musicians to find his work. During a period of improvement in spring or summer 2025, another violinist proposed a paid collaboration and possible joint tour. Travis showed Ezra the message and asked, “Am I good enough for that?” Ezra answered, “Well, duh.” The collaboration did not occur before Travis relapsed.

In December 2024, Travis was absent from the residence hall for four days. Rowan waited for news and, after four days without knowing whether he was alive, asked Ezra for that answer directly.

Main article: Travis Yoon’s Four-Day Absence (December 2024) - Event

During chemotherapy, fatigue and treatment effects made it difficult for Travis to write the music he could hear. In January 2025, Ezra began entering notation while Travis described and hummed the parts. The collaboration allowed Travis to continue composing during treatment.

Main article: Travis Yoon - Composition Breakdown and Scribe Sessions Begin (Mid-January 2025) - Event

Juilliard Friends and Housing

Travis’s theory study group included Brooke Kim, Dylan Abrams, Sarah Montalvo De Luca, Gavin Worth, and Aditi Sharma. The five friends rented the two duplexes at The 146th Street House, where Travis joined them for meals, study sessions, and ordinary visits. Dylan and Gavin kept the third bedroom in their duplex available, furnished it with a full-size bed and a few of Travis’s own things, and repeatedly encouraged him to take it.

Near the end of summer 2024, Aditi’s father, Rajiv Sharma, arranged for the six friends to spend a full week at a Cape Cod house owned by family friends before the academic year began. The other five continued urging Travis to take the open bedroom throughout the vacation. He accepted a temporary place inside the shared household while remaining unable to trust that they wanted him to make the same arrangement permanent in New York.

The invitation was sincere, but Travis did not trust it as evidence that his friends wanted him there. He privately believed that most people tolerated him rather than actively liked him and interpreted repeated welcome as politeness. Juilliard tuition and New York City’s cost of living made remaining in campus housing financially defensible, but his private reason was the risk of accepting the room and discovering that tolerance was all they had meant.

Brooke was the soft-spoken member of the group. When the friends learned that Ezra had been calling Travis “Trevor,” Brooke honored Travis’s request to end the confrontation by saying, “Okay, Trav. We’re dropping it.”

Before Travis left campus, students throughout their cohort expected him and Brooke to eventually become a couple. Brooke had not consciously understood their closeness as romantic; she had assumed that Travis would remain part of her future. Nobody told her about the cohort’s expectation while he was alive. Another student disclosed it casually after his death, believing Brooke already knew, when she could no longer examine the possibility with him.

Habits and Daily Life

Travis practiced violin for hours each day, attended Professor Eun-Ji’s lessons consistently, and used open portions of his schedule for composing. Friday pizza became a dorm-room ritual. He kept ginger ale and Kind bars in the mini-fridge, first for himself and then with Ezra’s preferences in mind. Before Ezra knew his correct name, Travis had already ordered pizza for him and intercepted a delivery so Ezra could remain asleep.

A ruler-straight strand of warm white Christmas lights was the most visible decoration on Travis’s side of the room. He turned the lights off after Ezra fell asleep and turned them on again after Ezra left in the morning. The action became one of several small adjustments through which the two roommates cared for each other before either of them named what was developing between them.

Ezra made a similarly small adjustment one morning, moving Travis’s glasses from the nightstand to the desk where Travis would see them.

Travis could disappear into composition work late at night or between other obligations. Away from rehearsal and coursework, he watched sad romances, played classical guitar for himself, considered clothes and accessories with Hana, and saved the photographs she sent him. His routines included both the discipline of conservatory training and ordinary private pleasures that did not depend on his usefulness to anyone else.

Leukemia Diagnosis and Treatment

Main article: Travis Yoon (Battle with ALL)

Travis was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia in late December 2024. He completed approximately six weeks of induction chemotherapy in New York before transferring to Northwestern Memorial Hospital for consolidation treatment closer to his family in Evanston.

The first changes had begun around mid-October. Fatigue stopped resolving with rest; bone pain affected his shins, sternum, and hips; his hands stayed cold; and nausea, reflux, appetite loss, easy bruising, deepening shadows under his eyes, and a gray cast to his complexion developed gradually. He lost weight from an already slight frame. Long sleeves and winter layers concealed bruises on his forearms and shins, while hand warmers and scarves made his cold hands look like an ordinary response to the season.

Travis repeatedly allowed himself to close his eyes “just for a second” and then slept for twenty, forty, or sixty minutes. He fell asleep during a theory study session and while waiting for pizza. Ezra noticed that his quiet snoring, which he had called a “tiny oboe,” became heavier and developed a nasal rattle. No single observation gave Travis or his friends a reliable explanation for the full pattern.

During finals week, Travis had a nosebleed that continued for thirteen minutes. The morning after his fall jury, he vomited blood. Ezra carried him down four flights of stairs and reached NewYork-Presbyterian at 5:47 AM. Testing led to the leukemia diagnosis.

During induction, Travis used dry humor around changes including hair loss, texted Ezra photographs of hospital food with ratings from one to a Kind bar, and continued working whenever treatment allowed. When fatigue and treatment effects interrupted his ability to enter notation, he woke from one attempt to find three and a half measures on the page and a pencil trail where his hand had stopped. Ezra opened Sibelius and began taking dictation while Travis described or hummed each part. The first session produced eight measures and established the scribe process that helped Travis complete ‘’이어받은 선율’‘.

The scribe process continued after Travis returned to Evanston, but it did not replace his independent work. On good days, Travis could still enter and complete music himself. In late July, he finished one piece independently while Ezra continued assisting with other work when fatigue or tremor made transcription difficult. Travis remained the sole composer and final authority over every measure.

Travis initially responded to treatment. The leukemia later relapsed, second-line treatment failed, and the disease became refractory. During his final day, a presumed bloodstream infection progressed rapidly to sepsis in the context of progressive marrow failure. He died at the Yoon family home with his family and Ezra present in August 2025.

Main article: Death of Travis Yoon (2025)

Main article: Funeral and Memorials for Travis Yoon (2025)

Ezra paid for Brooke, Aditi, Dylan, Sarah, Gavin, Rowan, and Tyler to travel from New York to Evanston for Travis’s funeral. A later memorial was held in New York City, where Ezra asked Travis’s friends to participate.

His death left unfinished and completed work rather than a single final statement. The Sibelius cadenza remained unperformed. Juilliard students later performed his string quartets in memorial concerts. Friends who had understood his exhaustion as part of conservatory life revisited those memories after learning what had been happening, while his family retained both the work he had completed and the ordinary routines through which he had belonged to them.

Relationship to His Body

Travis kept his nails short, moisturized regularly, and paid attention to hydration because his hands were part of his instrument.

He minimized his worsening symptoms with the recurring response, “I’m fine.” When Ezra confronted him about minimizing symptoms during his leukemia treatment, Travis answered, “I didn’t think anyone would notice.”

After the doctors explained that second-line treatment had failed, Travis begged Eun-joo in Korean to let him leave the hospital and return home. His family honored the request.

Back in his bedroom, Travis cried with Ezra and said, “I just wanted to fucking live, Ezra. I wanted us to make music. I wanted to see you be on magazine covers and be so damn obnoxious about it. I wanted to see you fill arenas and lay with you on the beach in the sun. I didn’t want… this.” He did not treat memory, legacy, or the music he would leave behind as substitutes for the life and ordinary future he wanted.

Relationship with Ezra Cruz

Main article: Ezra Cruz and Travis Yoon

Travis and Ezra shared a room at Meredith Willson Residence Hall during Ezra’s first year at Juilliard. They became romantic partners and did not hide their relationship. The romance lasted several months. Ezra remained involved through Travis’s initial hospitalization and treatment, visited Evanston during the spring, and stayed with Travis and the Yoon family throughout summer 2025. He was present when Travis died.

Fashion was one of their shared interests. They bonded over clothing and personal style while retaining their individual tastes.

During spring and summer 2025, Travis occasionally shared photographs of himself and Ezra through his Instagram account. The posts did not function as a formal relationship announcement, but the ordinary closeness and attention between them made their love evident to friends who saw them, including Aditi.

The Yoon family maintained its relationship with Ezra after Travis’s death.

Friendship with Rowan Collins

Main article: Rowan Collins and Travis Yoon

Rowan mentored Travis from his first semester at Juilliard and became one of his close friends and musical collaborators. Their work together included arrangement development and ensemble practice. After his death, she was among the musicians who recorded his arrangements as a posthumous gift to his family.

Music and Posthumous Release

Travis completed ‘’이어받은 선율’‘, a collection based on Korean folk melodies supplied by Soon-ja, during treatment. Travis remained the composer and arranger; Ezra served as his notation scribe during treatment and later coordinated the album’s release through the Fifth Bar Collective. Rowan was among the musicians who recorded the arrangements.

The collection connected melodies Soon-ja had hummed while cooking with Travis’s classical training and compositional voice. He completed the work during treatment, but it was not released during his lifetime. The posthumous recording and release preserved Travis’s authorship: the surviving musicians performed what he had written, the archive retained incomplete fragments without guessing at their completion, and the work remained credited to Travis Yoon.

A three-measure cello passage from one of Travis’s compositions was incorporated into Ezra’s wrist tattoo while Travis was alive. Travis understood the notation as a promise rather than a memorial. After his death, a handwritten score page from ‘’이어받은 선율’’ supplied both his capital ‘’T’’ and the notation for a separate memorial tattoo.

Memorable Quotes

“I didn’t think anyone would notice.”

(Responding after Ezra confronted him about minimizing his symptoms during his treatment for acute lymphoblastic leukemia.)

“Don’t let me disappear.”

(During the January 2025 composing crisis.)

“You called me Trevor for nine weeks.”

(Explaining his fear that people would forget him during the composing crisis.)

“I can hear all four voices. I can hear the whole thing. I just can’t get it out.”

(Describing the music he could no longer enter himself during treatment.)

“I’m fine.”

(His recurring response while minimizing his worsening symptoms.)

“Can we just drop it?”

(Spoken after his friends heard Ezra call him Trevor and confronted him about allowing the wrong name to continue.)

“Thank you for not dropping me.”

(To Ezra before leaving New York for consolidation treatment in Evanston. Ezra answered, “Never.”)

“This is a promise.”

(Describing Ezra’s wrist tattoo while Travis was alive. Ezra answered, “Yeah. Not a memorial.”)

“I just wanted to fucking live, Ezra. I wanted us to make music. I wanted to see you be on magazine covers and be so damn obnoxious about it. I wanted to see you fill arenas and lay with you on the beach in the sun. I didn’t want… this.”

(To Ezra in Travis’s bedroom after he returned home for comfort-focused care.)

“You don’t have to work the software. You just need to talk.”

(Ezra, establishing the notation-scribe process after Travis could no longer reliably enter the music himself.)

“Yo te escucho, Travis. Te veo. Y no se me va a olvidar tu nombre. Nunca.”

(Ezra’s response when Travis said that he was afraid of disappearing.)

Characters Supporting Characters Deceased Characters Musicians Composers Korean American Characters Disabled Characters Chronic Illness Characters LGBTQ+ Characters Yoon Family