Dr Diljeet Kaur Bhachu FHEA FRSA is a musician, educator, researcher and activist based in Glasgow. Graduating from the renowned BA Applied Music programme at the University of Strathclyde in 2011, where she also completed her Masters, she completed her PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 2019, with funding from the AHRC through the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities (SGSAH). Diljeet’s freelance work portfolio has included lecturing and supervision work in Higher Education and research consultancy, as well as producing and administrative roles within the arts sector.

After many years of being an activist with the Musicians’ Union (MU) and University and Colleges Union (UCU), Diljeet is now an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Officer at the Musicians’ Union. She was a co-chair of the STUC Black Worker’s Committee in 2022, vice chair in 2021, and sat on the MU’s Executive Committee in 2021 and 2022. She was a branch chair for UCU in 2021-22, and involved in postgraduate organising prior to this.

In 2017 she co-founded the Scottish-Asian Creative Artists’ Network (ScrAN), to address the issues specific to Scottish-Asians working in the creative industries in Scotland, and is a co-organiser of the Decolonising the Musical University conference that took place virtually in July 2020. Diljeet sits on Hal Leonard’s EDI Advisory Group, alongside other consultancy roles in the arts and cultural sectors. In 2021 Diljeet was invited to become a Fellow of the RSA (royal society for arts, manufactures and commerce), in recognition of her research and activism relating to race and gender issues in the music industry, and co-founding ScrAN.

Diljeet is one half of flutes/taiko/electronics duo Velma, with Georgie White. She is in the live band for Kapil Seshasayee, and features on his debut album A Sacred Bore (2018). She also improvises and writes for her own solo project with flutes and electronics and is currently writing her debut album. You can read some of Diljeet’s poetry in The Colour of Madness, “a BAME Mental Health anthology”, published in 2018.