About

Alexa Torres is a Latinx jazz violinist, composer, and ethnographic researcher based in Austin, TX and New York City. 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.

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.

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. In 2023, she began a PhD in Jazz Performance at NYU, fully funded by the competitive five-year Steinhardt Fellowship.

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 Fulbright Grant, the Austin Live Music Event Fund Grant, the Presser Graduate Music Award, and the Steinhardt Fellowship.