Bryce Noe is a PhD candidate in musicology at Washington University in St. Louis, where he is a recipient of the Dean’s Distinguished Graduate Fellowship and Lynne Cooper Harvey Fellowship in American Culture Studies. His dissertation is an (auto)ethnography of freestyle skateboard contests that considers the ways in which freestylers structure their routines around self-selected music and the role portable music-listening technologies in the 1970s played in freestylers incorporating dance into their performances (the subpractice’s transition from mere tricking to dancing). Noe has presented on the intersections of sound, corporeality, and skateboard culture at the Society for Ethnomusicology, American Musicological Society, Leisure Studies Association, and various other music and skateboard studies conferences. His research on skateboarding cultures is published in Leisure Studies, The Leisure of Grey Spaces, Urban Play and the Chromatic Turn (edited volume) and is forthcoming in the Research Handbook on Young People, Sport and Society (coauthored chapter with George Pettis), Jenkem Magazine, and Broken Fingers freestyle skateboard magazine. In addition, Noe is a professional freestyle skateboarder and, according to the World Freestyle Skateboard Association’s global ranking system, was the top-ranked freestyler in North America for the 2025 contest season. The German brand East Frisian Skateboards is currently manufacturing his first-ever signature model board—a skater's childhood dream.

 

Originally from southeast Texas, Noe also holds an MM in Musicology from the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music and a BA in Music and Psychology from Hobart and William Smith Colleges.