George E. Lewis is Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University, and the Director of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002, an Alpert Award in the Arts in 1999, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lewis studied composition with Muhal Richard Abrams at the AACM School of Music, and trombone with Dean Hey. A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis's work as composer, improvisor, performer and interpreter explores electronic and computer music, computer-based multimedia installations, text-sound works, and notated and improvisative forms, and is documented on more than 120 recordings.
Lewis was one of the founders of the Critical Studies/Experimental Practices graduate music curriculum at the University of California, San Diego. His essay, "Teaching Improvised Music: An Ethnographic Memoir" (Lewis 2000) recounts his development throughout the 1990s of new models for teaching improvisation in academic settings in ways that include historical and critical inquiry as well as performance. Lewis has also taught improvised music and interactive media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and in summer workshops with Martin Bartlett and Martin Gotfrit at Simon Fraser University.
