Paul Bancel is an audiovisual technician and musician, specializing in the digitization and preservation of audiovisual archives. He currently serves as the recording technician at the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive; one of the largest collections of ethnographic recordings in the country. He received his Bachelor’s of Science from Middle Tennessee State University in 2001, studying the production techniques and technology of the audio recording industry.

He has worked closely with the Metropolitan Opera in New York City to preserve and digitize recordings of their historic weekly broadcasts from Lincoln Center, and was part of the team tasked with the digitization of Eugene Smith’s Jazz Loft Project for Duke University. He is also a musician, and has performed original compositions at the FARO de Oriente in Mexico City and Vienna’s Künstlerhaus museum.