Adriana Diaz-Donoso (ella/she/her) is a Music Assistant Professor and Director of Music Education. She holds an M.A. and an Ed.D. in Music Education with concentrations in early childhood education and developmental psychology from Teachers College, Columbia University. Additionally, Adriana received a B.Sc. from the Universidad Nacional Agraria La Molina (Lima-Peru) and studied music at the Asociación Cultural Béla Bartók and the Universidad Nacional de Música del Perú.
She is a Peruvian bilingual (Spanish/English) woman of color and seeks to address social justice issues through the lens of the arts. Her scholarship focuses on equity and access to music education, the role of arts organizations in community building and social change, and diversity issues in music teacher preparation. Her dissertation, entitled “Musical Investment in Early Childhood: An Exploration of Parent-Child Participation in Organized Early Childhood Musical Activities,” examined the intersection of social class and musical parenting, shedding light on musical parenting practices beyond the white-middle-class experience commonly encountered in early childhood music education studies. She co-authored the article “Music as Transitional Object and Practice: Children’s Spontaneous Musical Behaviors in the Subway,” published in Research Studies in Music Education, a peer-reviewed journal.
Adriana has over fifteen years of experience designing and implementing diverse and inclusive programming as well as educational curricula to better engage students from various backgrounds and experiences. In the U.S., she has worked as an educational consultant with Columbia Head Start, The Philadelphia Orchestra, Lincoln Center, and Teachers College Community School. In Peru, she taught general music and piano privately and in schools and was a consultant for the Ministry of Women and Vulnerable Populations. Prior to joining NYU, Adriana was manager of the WeBop program at Jazz at Lincoln Center and adjunct assistant professor of Music Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is a recipient of the Fulbright Scholarship.
