Jorge Arévalo Mateus is an ethnomusicologist, educator, musician and producer.
His areas of expertise include performance of Latin-American and Caribbean traditional and popular music, American Pop, Folk, Jazz, and World Music, and policy development and management for cultural and social equity initiatives.
He holds a doctorate in ethnomusicology (Wesleyan University, 2013) and is project director for the Folk COLOMBIA Escuela (Center for Traditional Music and Dance, NYC). He has served as executive director for the Association for Cultural Equity/Alan Lomax Archive at Hunter College (CUNY); curator and head archivist of the Woody Guthrie Archives and Foundation, where he received a GRAMMY in 2008, co-producing the Best Historical Recording (“The Live Wire: Woody Guthrie in Performance, 1949”) and an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for the accompanying monograph. He was assistant director of the Louis Armstrong and House Archives at Queens College (CUNY) and has provided consultant services to the Raíces Latin Music Museum and Archives (Boys and Girls Harbor, Inc.), The Dance Theatre of Harlem, and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, among other public and private institutions.
He is an adjunct assistant professor, teaching courses in LatinX, Ethnic and Cultural Studies, and World Music cultures at the Center for Race & Ethnic Studies, Borough of Manhattan Community College (CUNY) and Hunter College (CUNY), the New School for Social Research and Marymount Manhattan College. He has published essays and articles in academic publications and professional journals, such as Journal of Popular Music Studies, Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM Journal), and CENTRO (Center for Puerto Rican Studies), and has presented academic papers throughout the US, South America, and Europe, including UNESCO-NGO global forums.