Susan Thomas is Director of the Sarah and Ernest Butler School of Music at the University of Texas at Austin and previously directed the American Music Research Center at the University of Colorado Boulder. A scholar of Cuban and Latin American music, she is the author of Cuban Zarzuela: Performing Race and Gender on Havana's Lyric Stage (winner of the Robert M. Stevenson Prize from the American Musicological Society and the Pauline Alderman Book Award from the International Alliance of Women in Music) and numerous articles and book contributions. Her second book, The Musical Mangrove: Alternative Trajectories in Cuban Popular song, is under contract with Oxford University Press. She founded and served as Editor-in-Chief of Americas: A Hemispheric Music Journal (University of Nebraska Press) and served as Executive Editor of Musicology Now. The recipient of grants from the National Historical Preservation and Records Commission and the National Endowment for the Humanities, she has led public humanities projects that focus on the rich musical histories of the western United States, in particular music for silent film in Los Angeles’ Grauman Theatres and diverse musical traditions from the city of Pueblo, Colorado. Her 2025 co-produced film, Song of Pueblo, will be broadcast on the national public television network Rocky Mountain PBS in fall 2025.