Polymathic Pizza: The Techno-Creative Salon

Jason King, dean of the USC Thornton School of Music, is a multi talented Canadian American scholar, journalist, author, musician, performer, producer, songwriter, radio and video host and event curator.

Before his appointment at USC, King was chair of the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, where he also served as a James Weldon Johnson Associate Professor. He was the institute’s founding full-time faculty member, working alongside music impresario Clive Davis to develop the program. He served as the institute’s first associate chair (2003-06); the institute’s first and only artistic director (2006-12); and the institute’s director of writing, history and emergent media (2003-20). 

As a professor at New York University, King taught classes for more than two decades on popular music history and geography, identity and cultural politics, artist development/A&R and music marketing/branding, and the social aspects of music technology. He taught the inaugural class at the NYU Abu Dhabi campus in the United Arab Emirates, and he returned as affiliated faculty to teach classes at NYU Abu Dhabi for four years. King also taught post-graduate studies for the MFA program in International Media Producing at Tisch School of the Arts Asia in Singapore.

King has published numerous scholarly essays and has been a longtime music journalist and cultural critic for publications like Pitchfork, Slate, the Los Angeles Times, The Root and Vice. King is the author of The Michael Jackson Treasures, a biography on the King of Pop.

He has appeared in many music documentaries, including Netflix’s This Is Pop series and ReMastered: The Two Killings of Sam Cooke, as well as two Spike Lee documentaries, Bad 25 and Michael Jackson’s Journey from Motown to Off the Wall.

King is also an inaugural member of the Hip Hop Culture Council at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., and the Black Genius Brain Trust, and he serves on the advisory board of the Journal of Popular Music Studies.

Stephanie Spray is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, where she also directs the Center for Ethnographic Media Arts. She is a filmmaker, anthropologist and educator whose work lies at the intersection of ethnography and art, with research interests in social aesthetics; visual, sonic, and media anthropology; conservation, climate change and the anthropology of science; and everyday religious practices. 

For many years in Nepal, she worked with itinerant musicians, known as the Gandharva or the G?ine, with whom she made five films and sound works, culminating in her feature-length film Manakamana (2013, co-directed with Pacho Velez), which won numerous awards, including two Golden Leopards at the Locarno International Film Festival and first prize at BAFICI, and was followed by a sustained theatrical release in the US, U.K., Canada, Germany, and Japan. She is currently working on a film with conservationists in the south of Chile. 

Dr. Spray earned her PhD in Social Anthropology with Media at Harvard University, a Master of Theological Studies in the study of religion from Harvard Divinity School, and a Bachelor of Arts in the Study of Religion from Smith College.