Mario Cancel-Bigay

Ethnomusicologist, singer-songwriter and poet, Mario Cancel-Bigay was born in Puerto Rico in 1982. 

He learned to play the Puerto Rican cuatro, the archipelago’s national guitar and in 2005, he earned a B.A. in Modern Languages (Portuguese and French) from the University of Puerto Rico. In 2021, he earned a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology in the Department of Music of Columbia University. His research revolves around anticolonialism, decoloniality and cross-cultural encounters as heard through Puerto Rican nueva canción, chanson québécoise and related sounds of resistance from Puerto Rico and Québec during the 1960s and 1970s. 

Currently, he is a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University where he teaches Contemporary Civilization. He is the proud father of a brilliant Puerto Rican-Haitian girl named Gabriela.