"She brings a wide open palette to the proceedings. Knowing through science and instinct, study and practice, that any particular piece of song, of style, of flavor and flourish works to create the whole panoramic story."
All About Jazz
Alexa Torres is a jazz violinist, composer, and ethnographic researcher based in Austin, TX and New York City. She is a PhD candidate in Jazz Studies in New York University's Music and Performing Arts Department, funded by the competitive five-year Steinhardt Fellowship. Her research interests include auditory spatial politics, affective governance, and sonic territoriality. Torres's dissertation Jazz as Territorial Practice: Urban Geographies of Sound in Mexico and Chile brings together performance, ethnography, computational network analysis, and participatory sound mapping to examine how jazz practice (re)produces and contests urban space. Musically, she seeks to cultivate improvisational and compositional styles which are both historically and personally grounded, prioritizing contemplative melodies, rich harmonic textures, and atypical forms. Torres’s 2024 debut album In Situ has been played across international airwaves like NPR and featured in prestigious media outlets like Strings Magazine and All About Jazz.
In 2022, Torres became the first woman and the first violinist to graduate from the University of North Texas (UNT) jazz strings program when she obtained a Master of Music in Jazz Performance in the acclaimed Jazz Studies Department. Throughout her musical career, Alexa has performed in the US, Latin America, and Europe and has shared the stage with renowned, Grammy-winning artists such as Kurt Elling and Mon Laferte. She has played in a diverse array of venues and festivals including Carnegie Hall (NYC), Teatro Caupolican (SCL), The Elephant Room Jazz Club (ATX), Monks Jazz Club (ATX), Thelonious lugar de jazz (SCL), the Django (NYC), Soapbox gallery (NYC), South by Southwest, and Festival Internacional Django Reinhardt Chile. In 2019, the album Mundo Zero on which she recorded as a core band member was nominated for the prestigious Chilean Premio Pulsar award.
Torres views her ethnographic and performance practices as reciprocal, and her playing is deeply informed by her research. Alexa’s work as a researcher and performer has been recognized by competitive awards such as the ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Innovation Fellowship (2026), the PEO Scholar Award (2026), the Fulbright Grant (2022), the Austin Live Music Event Fund Grant (2023, 2026), the Presser Graduate Music Award (2022), and the Steinhardt Fellowship (2023-2028). Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Latin American Geography, UPDATE: Applications of Research in Music Education, and Journal of the American Musicological Society.