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 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. For four years I produced the annual Tejano Conjunto Festival en San Antonio, the first, longest-running, and most important Conjunto festival. I also created the multicultural Festival of Virginia Fiddling, which had three excellent events between 2021 and 2023.
I produce traditional music recordings for vinyl and digital releases on labels such as Zarza Records, San Quilmas 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. I write on a wide variety of interdisciplinary topics related to the global history, vernacular musics, and cultures of the United States.
I created a non-profit in new Orleans called Sonté to support music and wellbeing projects such as music-based interventions for people with dementia and their caregivers.
For work, I am the first Director of Strategic Initiatives at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I was previously the first Director of Strategic Initiatives at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio, where I worked on a wide variety of multidisciplinary projects in Latino and Native American cultural arts including the Tejano Conjunto Festival. I wrote all the grants for the Guadalupe, and created a new culturally relevant literacy program for local youth.
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. My book titled ¡Maldito Coronavirus! Mapping Latin American Musical Responses to the Pandemic Moment ( written with my co-author and friend J.A. Strub ) was published in 2024 by Equinox Publishing Ltd.
Dan Margolies 