Joep Bor is a musicologist, botanist, sarangi teacher, and a professor emeritus at Leiden University.

In 1983 he was appointed vice-president of the International Society of Traditional Arts Research (ISTAR) in New Delhi. In 1990 he founded the World music department at Rotterdam Conservatory, and seven years later the Jazz, Pop & World music department which he chaired until 2001.

After this he was appointed professor of world music at the Codarts Hogeschool voor de Kunsten, Rotterdam, and several years later as a professor at the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts (ACPA), Leiden University. He also was artistic advisor of the Concertgebouw for the Amsterdam India Festival in 2008.

In addition to about a hundred articles and book chapters on a wide range of topics, and entries in the leading music encyclopedias, Bor has written and co-edited seven books.

His monograph The Voice of the Sarangi was published by the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Bombay (Mumbai) in 1987, and The Raga Guide (with four CDs) by Nimbus Records (now Wyastone) in 1999. It has received wide acclaim, three international awards, and was reprinted many times.

Born in Amsterdam, Bor has a Masters of Science in Botany and a PhD in South Asian studies. He has lived more than seven years in India, carrying out botanical as well as musicological research. In 1968 he began studying sarangi with Ram Narayan. He had several other sarangi teachers, but his main guru was the vocalist Dilip Chandra Vedi.

His son Dion C. Bor is a special education teacher in Spencer, NY, a bluegrass singer-songwriter and bass player, and has a brown belt in karate. He and his wife Megan, an electrical engineer, have two lovely kids, Isadora and Kai.