Daniela Smolov Levy

Daniela Smolov Levy is a musicologist who studies the history of the democratization of opera in America, including Yiddish speakers’ engagement with the genre in the first half of the twentieth century. She is a Research Fellow at UCLA’s Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience and co-organizer of the center’s May 2024 conference, “A Funny Thing Happened On the Way To the Synagogue: Cantors, Opera Singers, and Jewish Performance Culture,” as well as co-editor, with Holley Replogle-Wong, of a forthcoming volume based on the conference presentations. Most recently, Daniela was part of the DYBBUK Project, an interdisciplinary collaboration of scholars and artists based at Tel Aviv University that explored turn-of-the-century popular Yiddish theater. Daniela holds a doctorate in Musicology from Stanford University, a Master’s degree in Piano Performance from New York University, and a Bachelor’s degree in Comparative Literature and Music from Princeton University. Her work has been published in the Musical Quarterly, Journal of Synagogue Music, and Wagnerspectrum, and she has given invited talks at UCLA, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the California Institute for Yiddish Culture and Language, and the Jewish Music Forum. Daniela has also taught music history and sociology at Pomona College, Occidental College, and the University of Southern California.