Staff
Terri Winston - Founder and Executive Director
Terri founded WAM in 2003 while she was a tenured Professor and Director of the Sound Recording Arts Program at City College of San Francisco from 2001-2011. Her love of music and the recording arts spans 25 years as a songwriter, composer, recording engineer, and producer. Winston was signed as a recording artist, engineer and producer by Polygram and BMG subsidiaries, and has shared the stage with such acts as P.J. Harvey, Pixies, Throwing Muses, Flaming Lips, Fugazi, Cake, and Third Eye Blind. She has collaborated with Lenny Kaye of the Patti Smith Group and Greg Hawkes of The Cars and worked as a recording artist and producer for MainMan whose roster also included David Bowie, John Mellencamp, Lou Reed, & Iggy Pop. Winston has composed and produced theme music for KRON-TV's "First Cut" series, Banana Republic and for various films that have shown on BRAVO's Independent Film Channel, French Television's Cine Cinemas and major festivals all over the world. She is a founding member of the seminal San Francisco band Her Majesty the Baby, a two-time National Lilith Fair Tour finalist, has received numerous awards including an ASCAP songwriting award, Boston Music Award and Bay Area Music Award nominations, is a voting member of the National Academy of the Recording Arts and Sciences and is active in the Producers and Engineers wing. Winston has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University.
Laura Dean - WAM Staff Engineer
Dean is a veteran recording engineer, based in San Francisco. She has worked at Tiny Telephone and Hyde Street and now graces the WAM studio with her presence. Clients include Sean Dorsey, Necessary Monsters, John Vanderslice, Tiny Television, Dolorata, Shawna Virago, Katastrophe, Amanda Palmer and the Dead Kennedy's. There is a reason we call her "the wizard".
Jenny Thornburg - WAM Staff Engineer
Jenny was born and raised in the Bay Area. She received her B.A. from San Francisco State University and has worked at many studios around the Bay Area including Fantasy Studios, Broken Radio, Laughing Tiger, and Spliggityfidge Studios. Some of the artists she has worked with are George Winston, Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine, Weather Pending, Tropicali, Pete Devines Jug Band and Pamela Rose.
Noelle Duncan - Facility and Media Manager
Originally from rural Vermont, Noelle has found a nice home in the music and arts community in the Bay Area. Noelle is a recording artist, songwriter, and performer. She has also worked as a marketing professional and copywriter for over four years for various start-ups and nonprofit organizations such as Women Impacting Public Policy and Aorta Magazine. Noelle earned her B.A. at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec.
When not at WAM, Noelle writes copious amounts of music for her Bay Area-based electro-funk band, Elle Niño, and her numerous solo projects under the moniker Sapphic Lasers. She has a particular affinity for sound design, vintage synthesizers, unusual drum sounds, manipulating vocal tracks, and recording vocals in odd positions and potentially dangerous settings (underwater in a bathtub, etc.).
Kristina Spear - Intern
Kristina discovered her love for recording as a teenager when she was a summer volunteer for her local public radio station and helped assist in recording/editing various projects. After craftily transforming her bedroom into a small-scale project studio to be used by a number of her friends, her mother discovered the jungle of cables dangling from the rafters and without hesitation, suggested a career in audio.
After spending two years at California State University and two more years at the Art Institute of California – San Francisco majoring in Audio Production she has adapted an interest electronics and building her own gear including, most recently, a band-pass filter and a large diaphragm condenser microphone. She hopes to someday work in film production, music studios or recording for broadcast radio.