Dr. Steven Lewis is the Curator of Music and Performing Arts at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Before joining the Smithsonian Institution, he served as the founding Curator of the National Museum of African American Music. He holds a B.A. in Jazz Studies from Florida State University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Critical and Comparative Studies in Music from the University of Virginia, where he was an Edgar Shannon Jefferson Fellow in Music. Dr. Lewis’s research focuses on late 20th-century jazz history, 19th-century African American music, and African American intellectual history. He has presented lectures on these topics in the United States, Canada, and Europe, and his work as a scholar and curator has been featured on television and in major publications including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. In addition to his duties at NMAAM, he is a Visiting Scholar at Vanderbilt University, where he collaborates with Vanderbilt faculty and library staff as part of a NMAAM/VU partnership to build a world-class archive of African American music. He has served as a Historian and Curator for the Ed Johnson Memorial Project and an Advisory Scholar for the Carnegie Hall Corporation. Before joining the staff of NMAAM, he worked as a research assistant at the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.