Vijay Lyer

Composer-pianist VIJAY IYER has released two dozen albums, including seven on ECM Records, and has collaborated with Amiri Baraka, Wadada Leo Smith, Carrie Mae Weems, Teju Cole, Tyshawn Sorey, Pamela Z, Henry Threadgill, Jennifer Koh, Matt Haimovitz, Brentano Quartet, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and many other artists across disciplines. He received a MacArthur Fellowship, a U.S. Artists Fellowship, the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, the Alpert Award in the Arts, and two German Echo Awards, and was the four-time Jazz Artist of the Year in the DownBeat International Critics’ Poll. At Harvard he holds a joint appointment in the Department of Music and the Department of African and African American Studies, and he founded the Department of Music’s doctoral program in Creative Practice and Critical Inquiry. His recent writings appear in The Oxford Handbook of Critical Concepts in Music Theory, The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, Sounding Together: Collaborative Perspectives on U.S. Music in the 21st Century, and the journal Jazz and Culture. He earned a PhD from U.C. Berkeley in an interdisciplinary program in Technology and the Arts.