Lara Pellegrinelli is a researcher, writer, editor, and educator with bylines in The New York Times and the Village Voice. She was the commissioned writer for Columbia University’s Miller Theatre and its Composer Portrait series from 2018 until 2023. Musical America named her one of its “Top Professionals of 2022.”

Pellegrinelli began reporting locally in New York for WNYC and producing segments for its daily music talk show, SoundCheck. She has been a contributor to NPR’s arts coverage since 2008, reporting stories that have been heard on Morning Edition, All Things Considered and Weekend Edition. From 2011 to 2014, she was the coordinator for educational outreach and audience development for NPR’s Live from the Village Vanguard and wrote regularly for A Blog Supreme. In 2021, Pellegrinelli led a team of reporters in a data analysis of the NPR Music Jazz Critics poll, published on NPR Music as “Equal at Last? Women In Jazz, by the Numbers.”

An ethnomusicologist by training, Pellegrinelli received her Ph. D. in music from Harvard University. Her dissertation, “The Song is Who? Locating Singers on the Jazz Scene,” is the first ethnographic study of jazz singing. She also teaches in the Journalism + Design program at The New School and as a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice at the Berklee College of Music.