Elizabeth Clendinning is Associate Professor and Associate Chair of Music at Wake Forest University, where she leads the ethnomusicology program and directs the Balinese gamelan, Gamelan Giri Murti. She teaches courses on world, Asian, and popular musics, integrating hands-on music-making and curatorial projects with critical study.

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Her research explores space, time, pedagogy, and cultural representation in transnational Asian performing arts communities—especially Balinese gamelan—as well as in film and television music. She is the author of American Gamelan and the Ethnomusicological Imagination (University of Illinois Press, 2020) and co-author, with Henry Spiller, of Focus: Gamelan Music of Indonesia (3rd ed., Routledge, 2022). Her work has appeared in Ethnomusicology, Musicultures, and numerous other journals and edited volumes.

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Clendinning earned her Ph.D. and M.M. from Florida State University and her B.A. from the University of Chicago. Before joining Wake Forest, she served as Visiting Instructor in Ethnomusicology and Director of World Music at Emory University.

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She is currently working on a documentary short film, Guna Pering (Uses of Bamboo; with I Gde Made Indra Sadguna), about bamboo flutes and sustainability in Bali; an article on teaching Balinese gamelan analysis; and a public-facing project on banned musical practices.

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