George Lewis is an American composer, musicologist and trombonist. He is Professor of American Music at Columbia University and Artistic Director of the International Contemporary Ensemble. He is a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the Akademie der Künste Berlin, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a corresponding member of the British Academy. Other honors for George Lewis include the Doris Duke Artist Award (2019), and fellowships from the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the MacArthur Foundation Fellows Program, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

Lewis’s central areas of research include the history and criticism of experimental music, computer music, interactive media, and improvisation, particularly as these areas become entangled with the dynamics of race, gender, and decolonization. He is widely regarded as a pioneer of interactive computer music who develops programs that improvise together with human musicians. His books include ”A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music” (University of Chicago Press, 2008), the ”Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, Volumes 1 & 2” (2016, co-edited with Benjamin Piekut), and ”Composing While Black: Afrodiasporic New Music Today/Afrodiasporische Neue Musik Heute” (2023, co-edited with Harald Kisiedu). Lewis holds honorary doctorates from the University of Edinburgh, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Oberlin College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, New England Conservatory, New College Of Florida, Birmingham City University, and Curtis Institute of Music, among others. 
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