Jonathan Leal is a scholar, musician, author, and experimentalist originally from the South Texas border region known as the Rio Grande Valley. He holds an interdisciplinary PhD in Modern Thought & Literature from Stanford University and now writes and teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
His recent musical collaborations have been featured in Air/Light Magazine, Pitchfork, Texas Highways, Latino USA, Democracy Now!, and elsewhere, and his arts and culture writing has appeared in the Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, San Francisco Classical Voice, and other venues.
He’s passionate about music as a route to social transformation, and he’s been part of the percussion education team at the Santa Clara Vanguard since 2013.