Biographical Information

Terry Dame - Bio

Terry Dame is a composer, multi-instrumentalist and instrument builder. Daughter of a piano teacher from a small western Massachusetts town she began playing trumpet and piano at age 8 and continued playing into high school. Upon entering college she put music aside and studied engineering, graduating with a degree in Environmental Design from the University of Massachusetts. After working a desk job at an environmental planning agency for about a year she couldn’t resist her creative impulses, bought a synthesizer and started composing and performing music with a local theater company. Ms. Dame moved to New York City in 1985 to study audio engineering at the Institute for Audio Research in Greenwich Village. On the first day of classes she drove to school, which turned out to be about 6 blocks from her apartment, couldn’t find parking spot and went home never to return, deciding once and for all a career in engineering wasn’t meant to be. She has been living in New York City composing and performing for film, video, theater, dance, and concerts ever since. She joined the Women’s One World (WOW) theater collective and produced four multi-media concert performances from 1986 -1990. In 1994 she scored her first feature film collaborating with director Maria Maggenti on “The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love”. Other notable collaborations include film makers Judith Helfand, Jennie Livingston, Diane Bonder and Erin Greenwell, performing artists Lisa Kron and Jennifer Miller and The Split Britches Theater Company and choreographer Jennifer Monson.

In 1995 Ms. Dame enrolled at the California Institute of the Arts where she studied composition with Wadada Leo Smith, saxophone with Vinnie Golia, Balinese Gamelan with I Nyoman Wenten, Persian music with Hossein Alizadeh, and Hindustani music with Rajeev Tarananth. She received an MFA in composition and performance in 1997.

Currently Ms. Dame directs and composes for as well as designs and builds the instruments used by the percussion-based ensemble Electric Junkyard Gamelan. She is the music director, composer and saxophonist with the seven-piece new music group Monkey on a Rail and a founding member of the improvisation trio Trophy Wife. She was selected to be a composer in residence at the prestigious Sundance Composer Lab in 2006. She was composer in residence and saxophonist with Jennifer Miller's New York based Circus Amok from 1994-2004. Ms. Dame is a member of Gamelan Dharma Swara, the traditional Balinese Gamelan based at the Indonesian Consulate in New York City and has traveled to Indonesia twice to study and perform at the prestigious Bali Arts Festival, Yogykarta Gamelan Festival and STSI, the national performing arts school in Solo, Java. Ms. Dame is saxophonist with Paprika, Brooklyn’s own acclaimed all-female international dance music band and Dawn Drake’s latin samba funk band Zapote. She was an artist in residence at HERE Art Center in New York City during 2003 & 2004 and has received commissioning funds from the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, The Rockefeller Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts and the Meet the Composer Fund

Notable collaborations include scores for Maria Maggenti’s Puccini for Beginners, which premiered in competition at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival and was released theatrically in 2007. Erin Greenwell’s feature comedy Big Dreams in Little Hope screened at the 2006 NewFest in NYC and the Frameline Festival in San Francisco. It was released on DVD by Woolf Video in 2007. Her score for Diane Bonder’s experimental short Closer to Heaven (which screened at MOMA) was awarded best sound design at the Ann Arbor Film.Festival.