David Hein is a Canadian librettist, composer-lyricist, musician, and actor best known for co-writing the Broadway musical Come from Away with his writing partner and wife, Irene Sankoff.^[1]

Hein was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, and was educated at Lisgar Collegiate Institute in Ottawa and York University in Toronto, Ontario.^[2][3] After graduating, he and his fiancée moved to New York City in 1999 where he worked at a music studio and she studied at the Actors Studio. After spending several years studying and working in New York the couple returned to Toronto where Hein wrote a song "My Mother's Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding", about his mother and her later life partner, which he and Sankoff expanded into a play that was staged at the Toronto Fringe Festival in 2009 and then picked up by Mirvish Productions for a run at Toronto's Panasonic Theatre before touring Canada.^[4][5][6]

As a result of My Mother’s Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding's success, theatre producer Michael Rubinoff approached Hein and Sankoff with his idea about a show based on Operation Yellow Ribbon in which residents of Gander, Newfoundland, housed 7,000 airline passengers who had been stranded at Gander Airport as a result of the grounding of all North American air flights following the September 11 attacks, which became the musical Come from Away.^[7]