Jan Meßtorff was born in Bremen in 1988, studied composition with Prof. Younghi Pagh-Paan and Prof. Jörg Birkenkötter, electro-acoustic composition with Prof. Kilian Schwoon and Joachim Heintz at the University of the Arts in Bremen and music theory with Univ.-Prof. Dr. habil. Birger Petersen and Univ.-Prof. Dr. Immanuel Ott at the Mainz School of Music.

He currently teaches at the Dresden College of Music and the Rostock University of Music and Drama and is doing his doctorate on harmonic dualism in the 19th century. Previous teaching assignments have taken him to the University of the Arts in Bremen, the Institute for Church Music and Musicology at the University of Greifswald, the Mainz School of Music and the Music Institute at the Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences.