Kwami Coleman is a musicologist, music creator, and an associate professor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University. He researches and writes on improvised and experimental music, American music history, jazz history, music and the African Diaspora, music’s political economy, music aesthetics and technology, and culture. He is a pianist and producer who creates solo and collaborative work with electronics, machines, and other human beings.

Coleman’s book, Change: The New Thing and Modern Jazz, published by Oxford University Press in September 2025, is a stylistic genealogy of the twentieth-century abstract music now referred to as free jazz, or jazz’s “new thing” as it was known in the early 1960s. In it he makes connections between how and why artists created this work, its cultural significances, and its complicated reception in the music press of the 1960s while providing readers with new ways to listen to and understand this innovative and disruptive music.

At Gallatin, Coleman teaches courses on American music history, music aesthetics, music and sound-based improvisation, and Black Music. He has, as a composer, premiered commissioned work for the Studio Museum of Harlem, Maysles Documentary Center, and the March on Washington Film Festival and continues to perform internationally. Currently, Coleman is at work on several recording projects following his 2017 full-length album Local Music.

Coleman was a founding member of the Afro-Latin@ Forum, a non-profit organization devoted to the study and increased visibility of Latines of African descent created by the late educators and activists Juan Flores and Miriam Jiménez Román.