George Lewis

George Lewis is an American composer, musicologist, and trombonist. He is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music and Area Chair in Composition at Columbia University and currently serves as Artistic Director of the International Contemporary Ensemble. He is a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, as well as a member of the Akademie der Künste Berlin. Further honors include the Doris Duke Artist Award, a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the author of A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press), and the co-editor (with Harald Kisiedu) of Composing While Black: Afrodiasporic New Music Today/Afrodiasporische Neue Musik Heute (Wolke-Verlag). Lewis is a Yamaha Artist, and is regarded as a pioneer in the creation of improvising computer programs using generative artificial intelligence.  He 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. Lewis is currently a Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination and will be in residence at Reid Hall in Paris for Fall 2024.