Women's Audio Mission


Women's Audio Mission is a non-profit organization based in San Francisco, California, whose mission is to promote "the advancement of women in music production and the recording arts."

History

Women's Audio Mission was founded by Terri Winston in 2003. Winston, who got a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University, is a multi-instrumentalist who had toured with P.J. Harvey, The Pixies, and The Flaming Lips. Winston had with a career in recording and engineering. Her father was an engineer and she "grew up in research labs around engineers that were always pulling pranks" on her; as a result, she said, she developed the thick skin necessary for a woman to succeed "in male-dominated careers". In the early 2000s Winston was a professor at City College of San Francisco, teaching recording engineering, when she founded WAM, the only all-female built and run professional recording studio in the world, a world-class facility located in downtown San Francisco, in the former SF Soundworks studio, home to projects by Alanis Morissette, Radiohead, R.E.M., and Timbaland with much of the equipment donated by various manufacturers.
WAM also organizes online classes; their Sound Channel program contains "animated, interactive e-textbooks that include audio examples, video demonstrations, DIY projects and quizzes" and was, according to Winston, used by 6,900 students in more than 131 countries.