Sophia Cocozza is a Ph.D. candidate in Music Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research sits at the cross-disciplinary intersections of sound, performance, and materiality, with particular attention to avant-garde installation art, multisensoriality, and disability studies. Focusing on transnational artistic exchanges between North America and Italy from the 1960s to the 1990s, her dissertation examines how avant-garde installations engage with sound, space, and embodied listening. Her work engages with performance studies, media studies, and archival theory to illuminate how ephemeral artistic practices shape accessibility, intermediality, and audience perception.
Sophia holds a B.A. in Music and English with a concentration in Museum Studies from Boston College and an M.A. in Musicology from Tufts University, where she completed a thesis titled Listening Otherwise. She has received several research fellowships, including the Salvatori Research Award from Penn’s Center for Italian Studies and the Tisch Library Graduate Fellowship in the Arts and Humanities.
Her curatorial and research experience spans gallery education, exhibition programming, and music performance. She has worked on exhibitions at the McMullen Museum of Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art at Penn, organized concert series at Penn and Boston College, and taught courses on historical musicology and musical listening. Accessibility remains a central concern in her scholarship, influencing both her research methodology and her engagement with the arts.