Jessica Bissett Perea
University of California, Davis
Jessica Bissett Perea is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work intersects the larger fields of Native American & Indigenous Studies (NAIS) and Music & Sound Studies. She specializes in Critical NAIS approaches to performance, media, and improvisation studies, and histories of Indigenous arts and activism in North Pacific and Circumpolar Arctic communities. Her research, teaching, and service priorities are informed by her lived experiences and academic training. She was born in Anchorage, Alaska and raised on her ancestral Dena’ina (Athabascan) homelands forty miles north in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley. Jessica studied double bass and vocal performance, music education, and history at Central Washington University before pursuing an MA in Music at the University of Nevada, Reno. She completed her Ph.D. in Musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles and was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Music at UC Berkeley. She currently works as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis, with affiliations in Human Rights Studies, Performance Studies, Feminist Theory and Research, Cultural Studies, and Writing, Rhetoric and Composition Studies.
