Kerry O’Brien is a musicologist and a percussionist, specializing in experimental music, minimalism, and countercultural spirituality. She has taught at Yale University, Indiana University (where she earned her PhD in musicology), and also teaches at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. She has recently presented her work at national meetings of the American Musicological Society, the Society for Minimalist Music, the New Music Gathering, and the 2018 symposium “After Experimental Music.” Over the past few years, her research has been published as an essay in the volume Rethinking Reich (Oxford University Press, 2019), as well as in the Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung, NewMusicBox, the New York Times, and the New Yorker online. Her research has been supported by a Presser Foundation Music Award, a Paul Sacher Stiftung Research Grant, a Getty Research Library Grant, and an American Fellowship from the American Association of University Women. She is a percussionist with the contemporary music ensemble Nief-Norf, and directs the research component of the Nief-Norf Summer Festival.