I am a writer, musician, and arts consultant involved in programming, event management, and grant writing for music and arts festivals, archives, and non-profits focused on arts and culture, history, traditional music, and cultural sustainability.
I run music festivals for various organizations such as the annual Tejano Conjunto Festival en San Antonio, the first, longest-running, and most important Conjunto festival, and the Festival of Texas Fiddling, which I founded in 2014 and for which I serve as President and Artistic Director. The Festival of Texas Fiddling is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based in San Antonio. I also created the multicultural Festival of Virginia Fiddling, which just had its 3rd event in August, 2023.
I produce traditional music recordings for vinyl and digital releases on labels such as Zarza Records, Chief Records, and Spring Fed Records. I publish regularly on music, particularly related to Texas-Mexican conjunto music, son huasteco and other Mexican migrant music cultures, and other vernacular music communities of the United States.
I am currently very interested in research and community work on the intersections of music and wellbeing. Trained originally as a historian, nowadays I write on a wide variety of interdisciplinary topics related to the global history, musics, and cultures of the United States.
For work, I am Director of Strategic Initiatives at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio. I work on a wide variety of multidisciplinary projects in Latino and Native American cultural arts including the Tejano Conjunto Festival. I write all the grants for the Guadalupe, and have created a new culturally relevant literacy program for local youth. I also launched an innovative music and wellbeing project on music-based interventions for people with dementia and their caregivers. I believe very strongly that interdisciplinary and immersive cultural experiences are the basis for social and intellectual success, true cross-cultural understanding, and impactful future leadership.
I am a historian by training with a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in U.S. foreign relations. My ongoing historical research focuses on legal spatiality related to offshore mineral extraction in the submerged lands of the continental shelf. Check out my research and recent publications page. I was Professor and Chair of the History Department at Virginia Wesleyan University in Virginia Beach after 22 years. I offered courses on U.S. history and culture, foreign relations, sound and noise, and selected topics in Asian history with a focus on Korean history and culture, and on American Buddhism. I also taught a class on sustainable beekeeping for twenty years!
In 2020, I launched a comprehensive survey of the varied musical responses to the COVID-19 pandemic within Latin American and Latino-American communities. Give a listen to my extensive playlist of música del coronavirus and see this link for my most recent articles on the subject. I am awaiting the March, 2024 publication of my book titled ¡Maldito Coronavirus! Mapping Latin American Musical Responses to the Pandemic Moment ( written with my co-author and friend J.A. Strub ) which is forthcoming from Equinox Publishing Ltd.
Dan Margolies 