NASHVILLE, TN — The IBMA Foundation has named Sofía Chiarandini the recipient of the 2026 Neil Rosenberg Bluegrass Scholar Award. This award is presented annually to an academic scholar for an outstanding paper accepted by a juried academic conference on an aspect of bluegrass music. The award includes a $1,000 honorarium, admission to the upcoming International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) Business Conference, and a ticket to the IBMA Bluegrass Music Awards.
Chiarandini, a PhD student at Brown University specializing in American and Jewish musical traditions, was selected for her research examining bluegrass, American folk music, performance, humor, and musical communities. She earned a Bachelor of Music from Berklee College of Music in 2020 and a Master of Arts in Ethnomusicology from Tufts University in 2026, where she completed her master’s thesis, The Wildness of New York Bluegrass of the 1970s.
“The committee appreciated the unique strengths and contributions of each of this year’s submissions, and agreed that Sofía’s paper was an outstanding piece of scholarship and writing,” said Ben Krakauer, chair of the award selection committee and himself the inaugural recipient of the award in 2011. “She sheds light on an underappreciated chapter of bluegrass history through original commentary and analysis and with colorfully detailed interview material.”
In addition to her scholarly achievements, Chiarandini is an accomplished performing artist and educator. A fiddler and vocalist, she performs with the Jewish bluegrass band Jacob’s Ladder and has appeared at concerts, residencies, and festivals across the United States and Canada. She has recorded and collaborated on more than a dozen studio albums and is a past recipient of both the FreshGrass Fiddle Award (2021) and the Fletcher Bright Award (2018). As a Suzuki-trained instructor, she leads workshops and operates a private violin studio in Brookline, Massachusetts, where she helps students build intentional approaches to performance and connect deeply with musical traditions.
Named in honor of renowned bluegrass music historian, author, and Bluegrass Hall of Fame member Dr. Neil Rosenberg, the Rosenberg Scholar Award recognizes graduate students and recent PhD graduates who contribute high-level original research to the field of bluegrass studies. The 2026 award is generously sponsored by Paolo Dettwiler.
To learn more about the Neil Rosenberg Bluegrass Scholar Award or to support future academic research initiatives in bluegrass music, visit bluegrassfoundation.org/neil-rosenberg-award.
About the IBMA Foundation
The IBMA Foundation builds a brighter future for bluegrass music by helping donors create a lasting bluegrass legacy. Through grant-making, scholarships, philanthropy, and planned giving, the Foundation supports programs and projects that focus on bluegrass music-related arts and culture, education, literary work, and historic preservation. For more information, visit bluegrassfoundation.org.
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