Jose Luis Hurtado

José-Luis Hurtado is a Mexican-born American composer and pianist working in contemporary classical music.
He holds a PhD from Harvard University and has lived in the United States for nearly twenty-five years. His music is performed regularly worldwide and has received numerous awards in Italy, Austria, Romania, Argentina, Canada, the United States, and Mexico, from institutions including the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, among others. He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a member of Mexico’s National System of Art Creators. Hurtado is currently a full-time professor at the University of New Mexico, where he teaches composition and music theory and directs both the Contemporary Music Ensemble and the Music from the Americas Concert Series.

Hurtado’s engagement with the visual arts stems not only from a long-standing personal impulse that has developed alongside his musical practice, but also from an ongoing investigation into parallels and reciprocal solutions between the two disciplines. As in his music, his visual work seeks dynamic, effervescent, and unrepeatable gestures—dense with texture, energy, and multidirectional movement—through which form emerges fr...