From childhood, Luciana Lombardi studied piano and cello, played in school and college honors chamber music ensembles and orchestras, and later performed in California, New York, Indiana, and Rio de Janeiro.

In Brazil she first held a bass viola da gamba, and when she returned to UCLA to work on her doctorate in Latin American History, she began to focus exclusively on performing and teaching that family of instruments, including the baryton. For the next thirty years she explored the vast repertoire of solo, continuo, and chamber music, performing, programming, and producing concerts with many organizations, Santa Cruz Chamber Players, Antiquarian Funks, Baroque and Living Music Festivals, the New World Baroque Orchestra, the Bella Musica, Galilei, and Sonora ensembles. She toured with the UC Davis Early Music Ensemble production of the Play of Daniel, and taught at the University of California at Santa Cruz, the Viola da Gamba Society of America Conclave and Pacifica Chapter, Community Music School and privately. She founded and directed the California Gamba Consort, Santa Cruz Festival Viols and UCSC Consort of Viols.

A member of the American Federation of Musicians Local 153, she presented music to hundreds of children in schools, and with her programs on public radio KUSP-FM between 1978 and 2004, broadcast the best of recorded music on her weekly show, "A Musical Offering." Annually in March, KUSP sponsored her series of programs featuring women composers. Luciana also hosted broadcasts from the KUSP Remote Van of the Carmel Bach, Cabrillo Music and other Festivals and concerts. Off air, she auditions and classifies hundreds of new recordings each year. In 1990, she was honored as the first Pataphysician of the Year.

Dr. Lombardi's website, musicandwords.net, spotlights The Choral Music of Lucília Guimarães Villa-Lobos. Her articles in the Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture are based on her dissertation, Women in the Modern Art Movement in Brazil: Salon Leaders, Artists, and Musicians, 1917-1930, UCLA, 1977, and her work also appears in Gender and History, the Pacific Historical Review, at meetings of the Institute for Historical Study, the Western Association of Women Historians, in various monthly and weekly publications, and in concert program notes.

Over the years Mary Luciana Lombardi wrote indexes for college textbooks, books published at university presses, and for the H. W. Wilson Company. As librarian, she worked at the New York Public Library, the Julliard School, at Indiana University, Bloomington, on California community college campuses in Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Pasadena, San Fernando Valley, and on University of California campuses at Los Angeles, Santa Cruz, and Davis. During a period of intensive research in Brazil in 1971 she traveled widely and taught library classification and subject analysis at the Biblioteca Nacional. At San Jose State University and the University of Southern California, she taught subject analysis, indexing, cataloging, and selection.

Her community service work on committees and boards of directors includes musical organizations with which she performed, the Cultural Council of Santa Cruz County, KUSP-FM, the Girl Scouts of America, and the Viola da Gamba Society of America.

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