Born in Mexico City, Mexico, Adriana Martínez Figueroa holds a PhD in Musicology from the Eastman School of Music of the University of Rochester.
As a specialist primarily in American music, broadly defined, her research and teaching focuses on the role that music—folk, popular, and classical—plays in the formation of national identity in Latin America and the United States, as well as on binational and transnational cultural processes throughout the region. Her dissertation explored the musical nationalisms (art and popular) of Mexico and the United States in the context of the binational relationship.
An article on a nineteenth-century Mexican album of piano music she discovered at the Newberry Library in Chicago in 2017 appears in a collection of essays published by the Universidad Internacional de Andalucía (2020). Currently she is preparing a scholarly monograph tentatively entitled Musical Encounters:Music, Politics, and Identity in the United States-Mexico Borderlands, which attempts, for the first time in scholarly literature, a comprehensive look at the role of music in the U.S.-Mexico encounter at the borderlands. In 2017 she worked on this monograph at an interdisciplinary, NEH-funded Summer Institute at the Newberry Library in Chicago.
Dr. Martínez has presented her research at national and international conferences, including those held by the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, the International Musicological Society and the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, among others. She has delivered guest lectures for Illinois State University, Arizona MusicFest, Dickinson College, the Handel Choir of Baltimore, and Scottsdale Community College.
Dr. Martínez is Assistant Professor of Music at Eureka College in Eureka, IL, where she teaches music history, music theory, and voice.
For her performance experience, please click here.