Boris Acosta-Jaramillo is a pianist, composer, improviser, producer, and researcher whose work moves between performance, composition, collaborative improvisation, and recorded sound. His music draws on a wide range of experiences—from jazz and improvised music to Latin American musical traditions and experimental practice—while his research examines how musicians interact, how multiple musical voices can emerge within a single performer, and how improvisation continues beyond performance through recording, editing, and production.

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Originally from Barranquilla, Colombia, Acosta-Jaramillo has developed an international career as both a performer and educator. He studied at Berklee College of Music and later earned a master's degree in Jazz Piano Performance from ueens Queens College, City University of New York. From 2016 to 2021, he served as Assistant Professor of Jazz Studies at Nanjing University of the Arts in China, where his teaching included jazz piano, improvisation, theory and harmony, ensemble performance, and Latin American music. His work as an educator has remained closely connected to his practice as a performer and composer.
 

As a pianist and improviser, Acosta-Jaramillo has performed and collaborated with musicians across jazz, experimental, and improvised music, including Mark Dresser, Terell Stafford, Dick Oatts, Wilfrido Terrazas, and Anthony Burr. His musical practice is grounded in collaboration and in the unpredictable relationships that emerge between musicians in performance.
 

His recording project Echoes of Origin explores memory, place, identity, and improvisation through a collection of performances developed through close musical collaboration. His forthcoming project, Emanations, expands this work through a larger ensemble and an approach in which improvisation, composition, electronics, recording, and post-production become interconnected parts of the creative process. The project is scheduled for release in 2027.
 

Acosta-Jaramillo received his Ph.D. in Music from the University of California San Diego in 2026. His doctoral dissertation, Emanations and Echoes: Modes of Interaction, Instrumental Multivocality, and Post-Improvisatory Composition, grew directly from his work as a performing musician and producer. The research develops new ways of understanding how musical initiative moves among improvisers, how a single instrumentalist can embody multiple musical voices, and how improvisatory decisions continue after a performance has been recorded. Central to this work is the Interaction Map, a system he developed for tracing the movement of musical initiative between performers.

Across his work as a musician, composer, producer, and researcher, Acosta-Jaramillo approaches improvisation not simply as a musical technique or genre, but as a way of thinking through relationships—between musicians, between different musical voices, and between performance and the forms that emerge from it.