Kendra Preston Leonard is a musicologist specializing in women and music in twentieth century America, France and Britain, and music and film.

Trained initially as a cellist at The University of North Carolina School of the Arts, The Peabody Conservatory of Music, The Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and The University of Miami, Leonard performed throughout the United States and Europe as a soloist and chamber musician before sustaining a career-ending injury. Shifting her focus from performance to historical musicology, she did her postgraduate work at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, where she held a University of Cincinnati Research Fellowship.

Leonard is the author of The Conservatoire Américain: a History and Shakespeare, Madness, and Music: Scoring Insanity in Cinematic Adaptations. She was a keynote speaker at the American Music Research Center’s Fourth Annual Susan Porter Memorial Symposium on “Nadia Boulanger and American Music.” She has presented her research regularly in scholarly journals and at conferences including those of the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, the International Alliance for Women in Music, Women in French, the British Shakespeare Association, and the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association. Leonard currently serves as a member of the Council of the American Musicological Society, the National Coalition of Independent Scholars’ representative to the American Council of Learned Societies, and is the editor of the Society for American Music Bulletin.

Leonard is the recipient of a 2009 Visiting Fellowship at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library for work on Louise Talma's opera The Alcestiad.

Leonard teaches at Westminster Choir College of Rider University in Princeton, New Jersey. She lives near Philadelphia with her husband, research scientist Karl Rufener.