Anthony Seeger is a Curator and Director Emeritus of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. Additionally, he is a Distinguished Professor of Ethnomusicology Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. Born into a musical family, he is also an anthropologist, ethnomusicologist, audiovisual archivist, record producer, and amateur musician. Professor Seeger received his BA in Social Relations from Harvard University and his MA and PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago.

Professor Seeger lived in Brazil for nearly 10 years and spent much of that time as a member of the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro. His anthropological research focused on the music and culture of the Kĩsêdjê people (formerly known as the Suyá) of Mato Grosso, Brazil. He also helped establish the Musicology/Ethnomusicology/Music Education MA program at the Brazilian Conservatory of Music.

Professor Seeger later returned to the US to serve as director of the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University Bloomington, where he also taught. He then moved to the Smithsonian Institution to assume the direction of the recently acquired Folkways Records and to become the first curator of the Smithsonian’s Folkways archival collection. He established the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings record label, where he was the executive producer for more than 250 CDs as well as a collaborator on DVDs and radio series. He was also the faculty director of the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive.

Professor Seeger has been active in several professional organizations. He served as president of the Society for Ethnomusicology, president and secretary general of the International Council for Traditional Music, chair of the Research Archives Section of the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives, and vice president of the Brazilian Association for Ethnomusicology. Professor Seeger was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he received a Guggenheim research fellowship, among other grants. He was awarded the Tai Chi Traditional Music Prize for lifetime achievement from the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing and also received the Lifetime Contribution Award from the Brazilian Studies Association.

Professor Seeger has published three books, four coedited volumes, and more than 120 articles and book chapters on the music and culture of Indigenous Brazilians, Indigenous rights issues, ethnomusicology, audiovisual archiving, American music, intellectual property, and other subjects. Among Professor Seeger’s books are Nature and Society in Central Brazil: The Suya Indians of Mato Grosso and Why Suyá Sing: A Musical Anthropology of an Amazonian People. With Dr. Shubha Chaudhuri, he coedited Archives for the Future: Global Perspectives on Audiovisual Archives in the 21st Century. Additionally, he produced and presented a 1988 series of six 30-minute radio shows for the BBC on American traditional music. Professor Seeger now lectures in the US and abroad.