Steven Loza is a professor of ethnomusicology at UCLA, where he has been on the faculty for thirty-four years, and also served as professor of music at the University of New Mexico, where he formerly directed the Arts of the Americas Institute. He has served as chair of the Department of Ethnomusicology and is currently chair of the Global Jazz Studies Interdepartmental Program, in addition to serving as director of the UCLA Center for Latino Arts. He has conducted extensive research in Mexico, the Chicano/Latino U.S., Cuba, among other areas, and has lectured and read papers throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia. He has been the recipient of Fulbright and Ford Foundation grants among numerous others, and served on the national screening and voting committees of the Grammy Awards for many years. Aside from UCLA and the University of New Mexico, he has taught at the University of Chile, Kanda University of International Studies in Japan, and the Centro Nacional de las Artes in Mexico City.

Loza’s publications include four books, Barrio Rhythm: Mexican American Music in Los Angeles (1993) and Tito Puente and the Making of Latin Music (1999), both published by the University of Illinois Press, The Jazz Pilgrimage of Gerald Wilson (2018, University of Mississippi Press), and Barrio Harmonics: Essays on Chicano/Latino Music (in press, UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Publications). Loza has published numerous research journal articles and edited four book anthologies, Musical Aesthetics and Multiculturalism in Los Angeles (UCLA Ethnomusicology Publications, 1994), Musical Cultures of Latin America: Global Effects, Past and Present (UCLA Ethnomusicology Publications, 2003), Musicología global: pensamientos clasicos y contemporaneos sobre la etnomusicología (CENIDIM/CONACULTA, Mexico, 2017), and Religion as Art: Guadalupe, Orishas, Sufi (University of New Mexico Press, 2009).

Loza has performed a great amount of jazz and Latin jazz, has recorded three CDs on the Merrimack label, and has produced numerous concerts and arts festivals internationally, including his role as director of the UCLA Mexican Arts Series from 1986-96 and co-director of the three time Festival de Músicas del Mundo in Mexico City. In 2008 he produced a concert at Disney Hall in Los Angeles featuring the Mexico City Philharmonic Orchestra that included the world premiere of his tone poem America Tropical, a multimedia symphonic piece based on the mural by David Alfaro Siqueiros. Loza directed a tour and cultural interchange featuring Mariachi Los Camperos de Nati Cano performing with the National Symphony Orchestra of Cuba at Casa de las Americas in Havana in 2016, and has developed various recent UCLA projects with Cuba. Recently. he has been collaborating with musicians representing various world music traditions interpreting and experimenting with improvisation in live and recorded performances.

Music of Latin America, Mexico, Cuba; Chicano/Latino music in the U.S.; religion as art; mestizaje; identity and marginality; cross-cultural aesthetics; ethnomusicological history and critique.

Ph.D. Music, UCLA; M.A. Latin American Studies, UCLA; B.A. Music, Cal Poly Pomona