Marcelo Boccato Kuyumjian is an interdisciplinary scholar of race and music with focus on black music of the Americas. He is a DMA candidate in the Jazz Studies program and a current recipient of the Graduate College Dissertation Completion Fellowship at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he was also a 2018-19 Graduate Fellow with the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities. His dissertation project “Performing Samba: Aesthetics, Transnational Modernisms, and Race” analyzes commercial recordings of samba and writings on music from 1902 to 1968 in order to interrogate how was samba used to engender different, and sometimes conflicting ideologies and identities of race and nation in Brazil.