Directory

Jessica Grimmer

BIO

Jessica Grimmer’s research examines the intersection of archives and digital musicology, with particular attention paid to sustaining digital knowledge infrastructures, music encoding, and pedagogy. Her current projects focus on preserving the work of contemporary composers, digital humanities in music, and the cultural history of opera in Washington, D.C. She is a key contributor to the Sustaining Digital Community Collections project and collaborates widely on digital curation initiatives bridging archives, technology, and the performing arts. Her musicological scholarship examines the musical resonances of the Holocaust in Europe and North America.

Grimmer joined the University of Maryland’s College of Information in 2024, where she serves as Co-Director of the Center for Archival Futures (CAFe) and Lecturer. She teaches courses in archives and digital curation and is developing new interdisciplinary offerings that connect music, digital humanities, and information studies. She previously held roles across academia and government, including as a project archivist with Special Collections in Performing Arts at UMD Libraries, a lecturer in Musicology at the UMD School of Music, and an examiner at the U.S. Copyright Office, where she developed expertise in copyright practices for the performing arts and emerging AI-created works.

She holds a Ph.D. in Historical Musicology from the University of Michigan and a Master of Library and Information Science from UMD’s College of Information. She also earned Master of Music and Bachelor of Music degrees from the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music.