Maggi Payne is Co-Director (since 1992) of the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College, Oakland, CA, where she teaches recording engineering, composition, and electronic music. She also freelances as a recording engineer and editor and a historical remastering engineer.
Her electroacoustic works often include visual elements which she creates, including video, dance, transparencies, and film. She enjoys collaborating with other artists and has worked with video artist Ed Tannenbaum for over twenty years. She is also a flutist, and has written several works for flute as well as other acoustic instruments.
Major works include her video/film/dance works Through the Looking Glass, Quicksilver, Liquid Amber, Cloud Fields, Effervescence, System Test (fire and ice), Apparent Horizon, Liquid Metal, Airwaves (realities), Crystal, Solar Wind, Circular Motions, Transparencies, Allusions, and Orion, and audio works Coronal Rain, Sferics, BAM, Black Ice, Beyond, STATIC, ROAR, Wet, Surface Tension, Shh, Glassy Metals, Electric Ice, Arctic Winds, fff, Santa Fe, Motor Rhythms, FIZZ, Of All, Distant Thunder, Reflections, Brass Mirrors, Fluid Dynamics, Holding Pattern, breaks/motors, Shh, White Turbulence 2000, HUM 2, Sweet Dreams, Close-ups, Raw Data, Minutia 0-13, Aeolian Confluence, Resonant Places, Desertscapes, Phase Transitions, Songs of Flight, Ahh-Ahh (ver 2.1), White Night, Subterranean Network, Ling, Scirocco, and HUM.
She has had performances of her works throughout the Americas, Europe, Japan, and Australasia. She received two Composer's Grants and an Interdisciplinary Arts Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and video grants from the Western States Regional Media Arts Fellowships Program and the Mellon Foundation. She received six honorary mentions from Bourges, and one from Prix Ars Electronica, and was an Artist in Residence at the Exploratorium in San Francisco and the Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, CA.
Her works are available on Aguirre, The Label, Root Strata, Lovely Music, Starkland, Innova, Music and Arts, Centaur, MMC, CRI, Digital Narcis, Frog Peak, Asphodel, and/OAR, Ubuibi, and Mills College labels. Her work, Desertscapes, for two spatially separated women’s choruses, is available through Treble Clef Press.