The International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance is pleased to announce the 2025 prizes for Best Article, Best Book, Best Documentary Film or Video, and Best Student Paper Prize. We received a record number of submissions in each category, and they were evaluated with the greatest of care and sensitivity, keeping in mind the ICTMD’s mission “to promote research, documentation, safeguarding, and sustainability of music, dance, and related performing arts, taking into account the diversity of cultural practices, past and present, and scholarly traditions worldwide.” 

Find below the details of the four categories of prizes for the year 2025. All categories except the Films and Videos have honourable mentions as well. 

Best Article

The members of the Prize Subcommittee for this category were Sunhee Koo (Chair), Larry Witzleben, Marko Kölbl, and Stefan Fiol.

Winner

Jessie Vallejo. 2024. “Mariachi Musicians and Collective Grief during the COVID Pandemic in Southern California.” In Yearbook for Traditional Music 55(2): 249-247. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

As both a scholar and a performer with the community, Vallejo has created an intense  and sincere narration of the devastating impacts of COVID on Latinx communities and the Mariachi community in Southern California. In addition to its exploration of music and health, it also weaves together important themes of low-wage labour and the lack of protections available to “essential workers,” and the types of environmental racisms in Los Angeles that exacerbated symptoms and negative health outcomes.

Honourable Mentions

Sean Williams and Lillis Ó Laoire. 2024. “Vernacular Catholicism in Ireland: The Keening Woman.” In Religions 15: 879. https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/15/7/879

Supeena Insee Adler. 2024. “Family Heirlooms as Social Objects: The Thai Musical Instruments at UCLA”. In Instrumental Lives: Musical Instruments, Material Culture, and Social Networks in East and Southeast Asia: 215-250. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

David McDonald. 2024. “Affective Assembly and Participatory Politics at the Palestine Music Expo”. In Music Making Community: 190-206. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Best Book

The members of the Prize Subcommittee for this category were Sean Williams (Chair), Frank Gunderson, Michael Iyanaga, and Fred Lau.

Winner

Sumarsam. 2024. The In-Between in Javanese Performing Arts: History and Myth, Interculturalism and Interreligiosity. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

The book provides a rich and comprehensive historical overview of Javanese performing arts. It explores the dynamic interplay of history and myth, intercultural influences, and the integration of different religious beliefs within Javanese arts like wayang (shadow puppetry) and gamelan (traditional ensemble) in its journey to the contemporary times. 

Honourable Mention

Shayna Silverstein. 2024. Fraught Balance: The Embodied Politics of Dabke Dance Music in Syria. New York: Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

The book by Shayna M. Silverstein is based on almost two decades of ethnographic, archival, and digital research on the fraught dynamics of gender, class, ethnicity, and nationhood in an authoritarian state. The author explores the socio-political space of Dabke, one of Syria's most beloved dance music traditions to write about its position at the centre of the country's war and the social tensions that preceded conflict. 

Best Documentary Film or Video

The members of the Prize Subcommittee for this category were Nicola Scaldaferri (Chair), Shan Du, George Murer, and Noor Al Qassim.

Winner 

Nalini Elvino de Sousa. 2024. Kantar Goa. 50 minutes.

This film offers a rich and layered exploration of the Tiatr tradition in Goa, tracing the evolution of Konkani music and the Goan musical tradition of "Kantar"; it is grounded in solid ethnomusicological research and is supported by a wide range of archival materials and oral histories.

Best Student Paper

The members of the Prize Subcommittee for this category were Sylvia Bruinders (Chair); Marcia Ostashewski, and Lonán Ó Briain. There were thirty submissions in this category in the forms of papers/presentations/essays, often accompanied by photographs and media materials. 

Winner

Ana María Díaz-Pinto. 2025. “Dirty Nights: Sensorial Filmmaking in Reggaetón Parties, Santiago de Chile” 

In this excellent paper, the scholar has explored the nightlife around reggaetón through sensorial filmmaking practice to learn and re-enact the party. She proposes filming as a tool  to evoke sensuous ways to place musical creation and dancing in audiovisual settings and to analyze multi-sensorial experiences. Following David MacDougall’s ideas, she puts forth the argument that filmmaking is one productive way to explore a method theory that involves evoking senses and physical, phenomenological, and social interactions. She leaves us with some questions such as how do reggaetón practitioners, feel about their nightlife(s) and  what are the ways they could express their excessive encounters with reggaetón? 

Honourable Mention

YiXuan Jiang. 2025. “Collecting Dust: Sensory Memory in the Performance Practice of the ‘Yunkong Di’”

This paper investigates the disparities in production and performance between the Yunkong Di and the contemporary flute, alongside the reasons for its obsolescence among modern musicians and persistence in specific music genres. The author uses sensory memory as an analysis tool, to engage with artifacts and sounds to evoke a multi-sensory experience among her collaborators. She writes, “Collecting the dust of history enables us to observe a shift in the perception of traditional Chinese music from the parallelism of multiple senses to a singular pitch-centred form”.