Ana Alonso-Minutti

Ana Alonso Minutti (she/hers/ella) is Professor of Music, Research Associate at the Southwest Hispanic Research Institute, and Faculty Affiliate of the Latin American and Iberian Institute, the Feminist Research Institute, and the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of New Mexico. She currently serves as Associate Chair for Academic Faculty in the Department of Music and as Musicology Area Head.

Her research lies at the intersection of musicology, ethnomusicology, feminist and queer theory, and decolonial studies. Working within this nexus, she examines experimental and avant-garde practices in Mexico and the U.S.–Mexico borderlands, situating sound within hemispheric and transnational contexts. By foregrounding Black, Hispanic, Indigenous, and Latinx musicians and communities, her scholarship reorients Euro-American historical narratives and expands the scope and frameworks of global music studies. To date, her research has generated fifty publications—including two books, over a dozen book chapters, and fifteen journal articles—and over 150 invited lectures, conference papers, and keynote presentations worldwide, reflecting both the productivity and international reach of her work. In 2024, she was awarded the Distinguished Lectureship Cátedra Jesús C. Romero by Mexico’s National Center for Music Research (Cenidim) of the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature (INBAL), followed in 2025 by UNM’s Ovation Award for Research and Scholarship from the Office of the Vice President for Research. A compendium of her publications is available at: https://unm.academia.edu/AnaAlonsoMinutti.

Her book Mario Lavista: Mirrors of Sounds (Oxford University Press, 2023), recipient of the American Musicological Society’s Robert M. Stevenson Award, is the first full monograph on this leading Mexican composer and a foundational interpretive study of Latin American experimentalism. The book fills a significant gap in contemporary music scholarship and advances new theoretical perspectives by rethinking musical cosmopolitanism from the Global South through an analytic framework that foregrounds affect and intertextuality while drawing on feminist writing strategies. Supported by a UNM Research Allocation Grant, it was published Open Access to ensure global accessibility, reflecting her commitment to equitable knowledge production.

Contributing to the growing scholarship on sound, noise, and musical experimentalisms, she coedited Experimentalisms in Practice: Music Perspectives from Latin America (Oxford University Press, 2018) with Eduardo Herrera and Alejandro L. Madrid. The volume expands the scope of experimental music studies by examining the diverse sites in which experimentalism emerges beyond Eurocentric contexts. Centering Latinx and Latin American practices from the 1960s onward, it challenges conventional definitions of experimentalism and highlights the multiplicity of artistic responses shaped by politically committed and community-grounded aesthetics.

Alonso-Minutti’s creative work extends her scholarship into public, collaborative, and community-centered contexts. Her award-winning composition Voces del desierto (2019), commissioned for Professor Szu-Han Ho’s multidisciplinary project Migrant Songs, interweaves migrant testimonies with biblical prophecy to reflect on displacement, resilience, and hope, demonstrating how research, creative practice, and activism can intersect. Premiered at the National Hispanic Cultural Center, the piece received the Robert Stevenson Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology. She is the only musicologist to have received Stevenson Prizes from both the American Musicological Society (2024) and the Society for Ethnomusicology (2021), a rare distinction that reflects the cross-disciplinary relevance of her scholarly and creative work.

Her recent research endeavors are anchored in a profound commitment to Nuevo México, a region where histories of colonization, resilience, and creativity converge. Central to this work is her theorization of noising practices that emerge from, and are deeply rooted in, this place. Through interviews, oral histories, site visits, performances, and sustained collaboration with local artists, she documents how noise functions as resistance, healing, memory, and community care. Her research is generating new primary archives and place-based theoretical frameworks that challenge narratives that have long overlooked the state’s role in U.S. musical history. She is developing a new book project, Noising in the Desert: Experimental Practices in Nuevo México (working title), the first study devoted to these practices and one that situates New Mexico at the center of American sonic experimentalisms.

She currently serves as Coeditor-in-Chief of the journal Twentieth-Century Music (Cambridge University Press), 20th- and 21st- century Area Editor for Grove Music Online’s Women, Gender, and Sexuality Project, a member of the advisory board of Sonus Litteratum, and curatorial advisor for Mediateca Lavista. She is also a Faculty Affiliate of Project Spectrum, a student-led coalition dedicated to advancing diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in music studies. Her extensive service to the profession includes roles as Council Member of both the American Musicological Society and the Society for Ethnomusicology, Chair of the AMS Ibero-American Music Study Group, and Chair of AMS Alfred Einstein Award committee.

Originally from Atlixco, Puebla, Mexico, Alonso-Minutti graduated summa cum laude with a BA in music from the Universidad de las Américas, Puebla, and earned her MA and PhD in Musicology from the University of California, Davis.