Photo: Kelly Fleming
Marcelo Boccato Kuyumjian is a pianist, scholar, and educator. He currently holds an appointment as Lecturer of Jazz Studies at Baylor University in Waco, TX.
Originally from Campinas, Brazil, he has earned a DMA in Jazz Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was also a 2018-19 Graduate Fellow at the Humanities Research Institute for his dissertation “Performing Samba: Aesthetics, Transnational Modernisms, and Race”.
His research was supported by the Lemann Graduate Fellowship for Brazilian Studies and the Graduate College Dissertation Completion Fellowship and he was a fellow at the Harvard University’s Mark Claster Mamolen Dissertation Workshop. He has presented his research at conferences of the American Musicological Society, Society for Ethnomusicology, ALARI Conference on Afro-Latin American Studies, Latin American Studies Association, International Association of Popular Music Studies, and Jazz Education Network.
Dr. Boccato Kuyumjian integrates his work as scholar/artist and music educator, developing teaching pedagogies that explore the intersection of jazz and other genres of Black popular music. As a graduate student, he created the Illinois Music Residency Program in collaboration with the School of Music, Department of History, African American Studies, and high schools in the Urbana-Champaign area.
Marcelo holds additional degrees from the University of Iowa (M.A.) and UNICAMP (B.A. in Popular Music). Prior to his appointment at Baylor University, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Bucknell University and served as Teaching Assistant at the University of Illinois with appointments at the School of Music, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and the Department of Spanish & Portuguese.
His performance and scholarly work focuses on the music of the African diaspora. His work as a leader includes collaborations with musicians from São Paulo, New York, and Chicago, including Dana Hall, Clark Sommers, Geof Bradfield, Tito Carrillo, John Ellis, Jay Sawyer, Diego Garbin, Cleber Almeida. In addition, Marcelo Boccato has also performed with the University of Iowa’s Johnson County Landmark and the University of Illinois’ Concert Jazz Band, Alicia Olatuja, Jimmy Greene, Jim Pugh, Chip McNeill, Larry Grey, Joel Spencer, and Rodrigo Ursaia.