Kyra Gaunt, Ph.D.

Innovative Black feminist scholar in digital and embodied ethnomusicology | Professor | Author | Senior TED Fellow | Singer-Songwriter Kyra D. Gaunt, Ph.D. has been a cutting-edge scholar in the field of embodied ethnomusicology for more than two decades. She currently teaches at the SUNY Albany. Her book The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop, funded by NEH and the Ford Foundation, won the 2007 Alan Merriam Prize from The Society of Ethnomusicology. The book and Kyra’s earlier publications contributed to the emergence of hip-hop music studies, black girlhood studies, and hip-hop feminism. Her current research explores the intersections of music, tech, and violence targeting Black girls shaped ecologically by the "musical Internet" from YouTube to TikTok. Check out her 2022 TED Talk How Black Girls Can Reclaim Their Voice in Music . Kyra earned her PhD from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and presently teaches at University at Albany-SUNY. In addition to scholarship, Kyra is a federally-certified expert witness in cases involving social media, especially FB. Check out her Small Thing, Big Idea episode, "How the Jump Rope Got its Rhythm," which has 7.1M+ Facebook views (that's more views the Adichie's "The Danger of a Single Story" or Byran Stevenson's TED talk). It has also been translated into 28 different languages.