Cassandre Balosso-Bardin is an Assistant Professor in Cultural Musicology at the University of Leuven (BE). She is currently the Principal Investigator on two funded projects focused on musical instruments as tangible heritage and the musical instrument making industry in Japan. Cassandre holds a PhD in music from SOAS, University of London (UK), and was a postdoctoral researcher at Sorbonne Universités (FR). She lectured at University of Lincoln (UK) from 2017 to 2022 where she was promoted to Associate Professor in 2022. In 2022, Cassandre was awarded a Chester Dale Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (USA) to carry out the first comprehensive study of their bagpipe collection (2022-23). She is the founding director of the International Bagpipe Organisation and publishes regularly in peer-reviewed journals

Cassandre trained in Early Music receiving a Prix de Conservatoire in recorder and Early Music in 2003 at the CRR of La Vallée de Chevreuse (France). She has performed bagpipes and recorders at many international festivals and venues including the Proms, Womad, Cambridge Folk Festival, Aan Korb BBC festival, and Stockholm Culture Festival. She regularly programmes world and folk music for a variety of events.