Donna Anne Buchanan (1960- ) is an ethnomusicologist and professor emertia of musicology at the University of Illinois. Born in Malone, New York on July 29, 1960, she is the daughter of Elizabeth and John Buchanan. After attending Salmon River Central School in Fort Covington, New York, she attended Belloit College (WI). Buchanan received her bachelor's degree with majors in music and modern languages, with an emphasis in anthopology, in 1982. Following this, she earned both her MM (1985) and PhD (1991) degrees in ethnomusicology from the University of Texas at Austin, where she studied with Gerard Behague, Steven Feld, and Stephen Slawek. From 1992 to 1997, she served as an Assistant Professor and Ethnomusicology Program Coordinator at New York University. She joined the faculty at the University of Illinois in 1997 and, in 1998, founded Balkanalia, the University of Illinois Balkan Music Ensemble. She was promoted to Associate Professor in 2003.
Between 2004 and 2007, and again from 2018 and 2019, Buchanan served as the Director of the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center at the University of Illinois. She is the recipient of many grants and fellowships, including a 2010 Fulbright-Hays Research grant, which was used to study music in Bulgaria. Between 2013 and 2016, she served as chair of the musicology division. In 2017, Buchanan received the Chancellor's Distinguished Promotion Award and was named an associate of the UI Center for Advanced Study. The following year, she received fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support her forthcoming book.
Buchanan is the author of Performing Democracy: Bulgarian Music and Musicians in Transition and served as the editor for both Balkan Popular Cultre and the Ottoman Ecumene:Music, Image, and Regional Political Discourse and Soundscapes from the Americas: Ethnomusicological Essays on the Power, Poetics, and Ontology of Performance. Her research interests have included acoustemology, performativity, postsocialism, cosmology, and social power.
She has served as the dissertation supervisor for many distinguished ethnomusicologists, including Carol Muller, Sandra Graham, David McDonald, and Magarethe Adams, among many others. Her contributions to the field of ethnomusicology include her service to the Society for Ethnomusicology as a Council Member, Member of the Board of Directors, Chair of the Nomination Committee, and Member of the Long Range Planning Committee. She remains actively involved in the promotion of folk music research inside Bulgaria, serving as a member on the Council of Member Institutions for the American Research Center and as the co-founder and member of the Board of Directors for the Vergilii Atanasov Founation for Bulgarian and Balkan Ethno-organology.
Buchanan retired in 2024, but continues to direct and perform with Balkanalia.
Sources:School of Music Faculty Profile, online at: https://music.illinois.edu/people/profiles/donna-a-buchanan/.
Donna Buchanan Curriculum Vitae (2022), online at: chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://csgge.illinois.edu/sites/default/files/cv/Buchanan%20CV%207%2015%202022.pdf
Curriculum Vitae in Donna Buchanan, "Musical Change and Ideological Revision: Creation and Concepts of Contemporary Soviet Popular Music," MM Thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 1985: 214.
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