William D. Buckingham is a New Orleans-based researcher, educator, writer, and musician. He is a founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Ethnomusicology. His doctoral dissertation was the first book-length study on the Isleño décima, a unique tradition of Spanish folk song from southeastern Louisiana, in over twenty years, and he founded the Institute for Public Ethnomusicology in order to build on his research and experience to reach wider audiences and work to sustain this beautiful and threatened tradition.

Since 2023, Will has directed the Louisiana Décima Project, digitizing and publishing an archive of field recordings that documented the diverse Spanish language traditions of twentieth-century Louisiana, and has collaborated with repositories, copyright holders, community members, researchers, and other stakeholders to develop public-facing resources with these materials to support language revitalization and music sustainability efforts for Louisiana's Spanish-language traditions.

His research has been published in the Jazz Archivist and Louisiana History, and he holds degrees in jazz studies and musicology from Tulane University, the MLIS and certificate in archival studies from Louisiana State University, and the PhD in ethnomusicology from the University of Chicago.