Dr. Nili Belkind is an ethnomusicologist whose specialty areas include the Middle East and the Caribbean. Her upcoming book Music in Conflict: Palestine, Israel and the Politics of Aesthetic Production (Routledge 2020) is an ethnographic study of the complex relations of musical production to political life in the context of the conflict. The book is an expansion of her dissertation (Columbia University). In her current research project, Nili is exploring cultural intimacy, as constructed and reflected in different musical case studies, in the context of the conflict and binary perceptions of Arab/Palestinian and Jewish/Israeli. Nili’s M.A. thesis focused on the musics of prominent Haitian artists who, due to social and political circumstances in Haiti, had relocated to New York.
Prior to pursuing her Ph D, Nili spent many years in the USA working in the music industry as a producer, record-label manager and A & R specializing in world music. As an album producer she has most extensively worked with artists from the Spanish and French Caribbean.