Dr. Matilda Ann Butkas Ertz is an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in music and dance. Ertz teaches at the University of Louisville (musicology) and the Youth Performing Arts School (piano, harpsichord, and chamber music). She frequently performs on piano and harpsichord and still dances. Ertz has a PhD in Musicology from the University of Oregon preceded by Master of Music degrees in both Piano Performance and Piano Pedagogy from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaing, and Music Education with Piano Performance (SUNY Potsdam). As a musicologist also trained in dance, she specializes in nineteenth-century Italian ballet music. Ertz’s dissertation is the first on the topic of “Nineteenth-century Italian Ballet Music before National Unification” and focused on materials from the Harvard Theatre Collection and the New York Public Library Research Collections. Recent research includes the intersection of risorgimento themes with Italian ballet, its relationship to social dance, and the music for the ‘ballo fantastico.’ She has also published on topics including George Balanchine, Schneitzhoeffer’s score to Filippo Taglioni’s La Sylphide, Nijinska’s and Stravinsky’s Les Noces, Salvatore Viganò’s La Vestale, Filippo Taglioni’s ballets, and most recently, general histories of ballet music including an Oxford online bibliography for ‘ballet music.’ Ertz has long been an active member of the American Musicological Society and its Music and Dance Study Group, which she co-chaired from 2017-2019.