From Santa Clara, Cuba, Dafnis Prieto’s revolutionary drumming techniques and compositions have had a powerful impact on the Latin and jazz music scenes.

His various honors include a 2011 MacArthur Fellowship, Jazz Journalists Association’s Up and Coming Musician of the Year award in 2006, a Grammy nomination in 2007 for Absolute Quintet in the Best Latin Jazz Album category, a Latin Grammy nomination in 2018 for Back to the Sunset in the Best Latin Jazz Album category, and a Latin Grammy nomination for Best New Artist in 2007. Also a gifted educator, Prieto has conducted master classes, clinics, and workshops around the world. He was on the faculty of New York University’s Jazz Studies program from 2005 to 2014; in 2015, he became a faculty member at the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami.

Since his New York arrival in 1999, Prieto has worked in bands led by Henry Threadgill, Steve Coleman, Eddie Palmieri, Chico O’Farrill, Arturo O’Farrill, Dave Samuels and The Caribbean Jazz Project, Jane Bunnett, D. D. Jackson, Edward Simon, Michel Camilo, Chucho Valdés, Bebo Valdés, Roy Hargrove, Don Byron, and Andrew Hill, among others. He has performed at many national and international music festivals as a sideman and as a bandleader featuring several of his own projects and music.

As a composer, Prieto has created music for dance, film, chamber ensembles, and most notably for his own bands, ranging from duets to big band, and including the distinctively different groups featured on seven acclaimed recordings as a leader: About the Monks, Absolute Quintet, Taking the Soul for a Walk, Si o Si Quartet: Live at Jazz Standard NYC, Dafnis Prieto Proverb Trio, Triangles and Circles, and Back to the Sunset.

Prieto has received commissions, grants, and fellowships from Chamber Music America, Jazz at Lincoln Center, East Carolina University, and Meet the Composer. In 2016, he published the critically acclaimed drumming instructional book, A World of Rhythmic Possibilities: Drumming Lessons and Reflections on Rhythms.

Prieto is the founder of the independent music company Dafnison Music.