Harris Eisenstadt (b. Toronto, 1975) is a Brooklyn-based drummer and composer whose music bends between the intimate and the expansive, with what The New Yorker calls a “deep-sighted and elastic view of improvised music.”

Over the past two decades, Eisenstadt has appeared on around eighty recordings, releasing more than twenty albums as a bandleader and leading many other projects across a wide range of settings. In 2024, he won Downbeat’s International Critics Poll for Rising Star Percussion after years of steady recognition. His albums regularly land on year-end critics’ lists for their adventurous spirit and clarity of vision.

A longtime explorer of African and Diaspora music traditions, Eisenstadt has made extended research trips to Gambia, Senegal, Cuba, Brazil, Mexico City, and Miami. He plays frequently for Afro Cuban ceremonial drummings around New York City.

Eisenstadt has published essays, articles and radio programs on NPR, Public Radio International, Afropop Worldwide, and in  John Zorn’s Arcana series. His recording Canada Day IV (2015) was featured on NPR’s Fresh Air. 
His 2018 music film We Are All Worthy of One Another, a collaboration with Matanzas, Cuba’s artist collective El Almacén, brought together more than thirty Cuban folkloric and classical musicians and filmmakers.

While best known for leading small and mid-sized improvising ensembles, Eisenstadt has also composed through-composed works for larger forces: his first orchestral piece, Palimpsest, debuted with the American Composers Orchestra (2011), followed by Four Songs (2013), commissioned by the Brooklyn Conservatory Community Orchestra. His first string quartet, Whatever Will Happen That Will Also Be, was recorded by Mivos Quartet (2015).