Ethnomusicologist Rebekah E. Moore returns to the United States and American academe after a decade-long career in international public and private sectors. Her professional scope has included performance production, band and tour management, media and sponsor relations, and social justice work. She has produced hundreds of music workshops, art exhibitions, concerts, and festivals featuring artists from six continents and ranging in size from intimate, indoor events to multi-day, outdoor festivals attended by thousands.
She has orchestrated national and international tours for Southeast Asian musicians and liaised with major and independent music labels and top-tier entertainment publications. In her most recent post, Moore was the Senior Manager for the world’s largest U.S. cultural center, located in Jakarta, Indonesia. Together with her diplomatic counterpart at the U.S. Embassy, she developed and implemented nearly 1,000 public programs, including weekly music concerts, creative industry roundtables, and artist talks and workshops.
Moore’s research undertakings are informed by the ethnomusicological concerns with music’s meaning in people’s lives and music as a communicative medium for people from diverse cultural and educational backgrounds. She has published articles in the Asian Journal of Communication, Asian Music, Collaborative Anthropologies, and Inside Indonesia on Indonesia’s music industries and indie scenes, artists’ employment of digital technologies to disseminate creative and activist projects, and community-engaged work as an essential domain of scholarly practice. She has published more than two dozen articles in Indonesia’s popular tourism and entertainment magazines Hello Bali, Jakarta Java Kini, and Jakarta Beat, and she has written for the country’s only feminist media outlet, Magdalene.
Moore is committed to understanding how music and all forms of expressive culture can integrate community values and facilitate empathy, tolerance, and equality. She has worked with artists, creative writers, and musicians to support grassroots action campaigns and fundraising initiatives for environmental conservation, women’s rights, and HIV & AIDS education. She is a co-founder of Bersama Project (The Together Project), an Indonesian nonprofit foundation that works with musicians and artists to stage creative interventions on violence against women and LGBTQ+ young people.
Moore holds a PhD in ethnomusicology from Indiana University, an MA in ethnomusicology from the University of Maryland, and a BA in music from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.