Paola Cossermelli Messina

PhD Student in Ethnomusicology

Paola Cossermelli Messina is a PhD candidate in Ethnomusicology at Columbia University, researching Arab music, sonorities, and memory in and between Lebanon, Syria, and Brazil. She holds a B.A. in Music and Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and an M.A. in Media Studies from The New School. Her thesis on the oral histories of Iranian women musicians was awarded a Middle East Studies Association's Graduate Student Paper Prize (2016). Her most recent thesis and project, an experimental ethnography on a jukebox in a lesbian bar, was presented at Harvard's 2021 Graduate Music Forum. For the past seven years, she has produced and edited the Arab Studies Institute's podcast الوضع. She teaches audio workshops at Sarah Lawrence College and, prior to pursuing her PhD, was the Project Manager for CUNY-Creative Arts Team's program Sound Thinking NYC, a free summer intensive for NYC high schoolers interested in careers in music production and audio engineering. She has been a Mason Endowed Fellow (2020-21), a Public Humanities Radio Play Fellow (2021-22) with the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities and the Center for Palestine Studies, and a Mellon Humanities International Travel Fellowship recipient (2023-2024).