PhD Student Alexa Torres Skillicorn Awarded Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship

Torres Skillicorn’s project examines jazz as a territorial practice that reconfigures urban space and belonging in Mexico and Chile.

Alexa Torres Skillicorn, a third-year student in NYU Steinhardt’s PhD in Music Performance and Composition: Performers program and specializing in Jazz Studies, has been awarded a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship. She is one of 50 graduate students nationwide selected from a pool of over 1,000 applicants through a rigorous, multi-stage peer review process that drew on the expertise of more than 170 scholars.

The award will fund Torres Skillicorn’s ongoing project examining how jazz is localized and experienced as a territorial and spatial practice in Latin America, with a particular focus on Mexico and Chile.

Torres Skillicorn brings a personal connection to her field sites, having spent several years of her adult life in Chile and parts of her early childhood in Mexico. She traces her interest in the connection between sound and place to those early years. At 11 and already a serious classical violin student, she found herself transfixed watching a Maya high priest play Cruzo’ob holy music in a Yucatec Maya community in Quintana Roo.

“Don Marcelino was a spiritual leader, a milpa farmer in his late 80s, and a standing general in a Maya resistance lineage dating back to the 19th-century Caste Wars,” says Torres Skillicorn. “I think that hearing him play violin was the first time I experienced the instrument as something beyond what I had been taught. I began to understand that sound is always bound to place and memory.”

Torres Skillicorn obtained her undergraduate degree in anthropology and Latin American studies at University of Texas at Austin. For her senior honor’s thesis, she combined her training in anthropology and music, conducting an ethnomusicological project on the contemporary resurgence of the Chilean cueca brava. It was also during this time that her interest in jazz began to take hold.

“I continued performing throughout college,” says Torres Skillicorn. “I joined a manouche group, and this is when I started exploring jazz and improvisation. After graduation, I moved to Chile for several years, where I lived as a full-time gigging musician and violin teacher.”

Torres Skillicorn obtained her Master of Music in Jazz Performance from the University of North Texas in their jazz strings program. She then enrolled at NYU Steinhardt, where her research explores the relationship between jazz, sound, identity, and urban space through ethnographic and sound-based methods.

With her fellowship funding, Torres Skillicorn will embark on six months of fieldwork in Mexico City and Xalapa, examining how transnational gentrification is reshaping neighborhoods where jazz clubs are concentrated; she will also explore how those changes affect local jazz communities, audiences, and sonic experiences of urban space. Toward the end of her stay, Torres Skillicorn plans to record an album of compositions from Mexican jazz musicians alongside her own.

This work in Mexico builds on research Torres Skillicorn already completed in Chile working with Mapuche jazz practitioners—the largest indigenous group in south-central Chile and southwestern Argentina. This portion of the project investigates how Indigenous identity and musical practice intersect within contemporary jazz scenes.

“Methodologically, my research combines interviews, participant observation, field recordings, and sound mapping,” says Torres Skillicorn. “Recordings of performances and everyday soundscapes in both public and private spaces will be integrated into an ArcGIS-based interactive sound map, creating a non-written, multimedia component to my dissertation.”

In addition to the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship, Torres Skillicorn has received the competitive five-year Steinhardt Fellowship, a PEO Scholar Award, a Fulbright Grant, two Austin Live Music Event Fund Grants, and a Presser Graduate Music Award. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Latin American Geography, UPDATE: Applications of Research in Music Education, and Journal of the American Musicological Society.

Learn more about Torres Skillicorn’s project on the ACLS/Mellon website.