Jeff Roy

A Los Angeles-based artist, Jeff Roy’s elegant and evocative music interweaves melodiously haunting strings, subdued vocals, elastic rhythms, layered organic textures, and atmospheric sounds from cityscapes and natural environments. Roy is a violinist, vocalist, and ethnomusicologist with a background in the classical musics of Europe, South Asia, and the Arab World. Their music swims in the cinematic soundscapes of neoclassical, folk, and indie pop, finding resonance with artists and composers like Anohni, Agnes Obel, Sudan Archives, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Max Richter. In addition to creating music, Jeff Roy is a filmmaker and scholar with a background in musicology/ethnomusicology, performance studies, gender and sexualities studies, film and media studies, and South Asia studies. Their award-winning films have screened at such institutions as the Director’s Guild of America, Film Society of Lincoln Center, the British Film Institute, the Godrej India Culture Lab, and have been featured in Out Magazine, Vogue India, and other publications. Roy holds a PhD in Ethnomusicology from UCLA, and is a Fellow of Fulbright-mtvU, Fulbright-Hays, and Film Independent Los Angeles. Roy is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Liberal Studies at Cal Poly Pomona and a recent Postdoctoral Fellow with le Centre d'Études de l'Inde et de l'Asie du Sud (CEIAS) at l'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, France.