jonathan leal is a scholar, educator, and multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, CA. Originally from the Rio Grande Valley, the South Texas region located at the border of the United States and Mexico, Leal creates literary, musical, and integrative arts projects focused on creative resistances to bordered life. 

Leal's musical projects have been featured in Pitchfork, Democracy Now!, Texas Monthly, Remezcla, Latino USA, and elsewhere; his public writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, San Francisco Classical Voice, and elsewhere; and his interdisciplinary humanities scholarship has appeared in the Journal of Popular Music Studies, ASAP/Journal, liquid blackness, Critical Studies in Improvisation, Rio Bravo: A Journal of the Borderlands, Journal of the Society for American Music, Jazz & Culture, American Literary History Reviews Online, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and elsewhere. He is currently an Associate Editor of the Journal of Popular Music Studies and a Board Member of the National Book Critics Circle, where he co-chairs the criticism category.

Leal is the author of Dreams in Double Time (Duke University Press 2023) and co-editor of Cybermedia: Explorations in Science, Sound, and Vision (Bloomsbury 2021). A former Emerging Critic with the National Book Critics Circle and AMS-50 Fellow with the American Musicological Society, Leal earned a PhD in Modern Thought & Literature from Stanford University in 2020 and is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Southern California. 

Leal's next book, Wild Tongue: A Borderlands Mixtape, is under contract at Duke University Press.