Phone:
Off: CPMC 248
m1leslie@ucsd.edu
M. Myrta Leslie Santana is an interdisciplinary writer, teacher, and performer broadly interested in the social, political, and economic dimensions of performance cultures in the Americas. They are currently completing their book manuscript Transformismo: Performing Cuba’s Future, an ethnography of drag performance in contemporary Cuba. Transformismo tells a story about how trans and queer cultural workers are using performance to cultivate spaces and ideas that go beyond the intensifying racial, sexual, and economic inequities that have beleaguered Cuba since the fall of socialism. In addition to their book project, Leslie Santana has published essays about music and performance, gender/sexuality, and education in Small Axe, the Journal of the Society for American Music, Queer Nightlife (Michigan, 2021), and Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology (Oxford, 2019). At UC San Diego, Leslie Santana teaches courses on trans and queer performance, expressive cultures in the Americas, and research and teaching methods. They grew up in Miami, Florida, and they studied ethnomusicology, women’s studies, and violin performance at Harvard University, the University of Michigan, and the Cleveland Institute of Music.