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 also enjoys collaborations 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 Electric Ice, Arctic Winds, fff, Santa Fe, Motor Rhythms, FIZZ, Of All, Eclectic Dielectic, Distant Thunder, Reflections, Brass Mirrors, Fluid Dynamics, System Test (fire and ice), Holding Pattern, Forest Sounds, breaks/motors, White Turbulence 2000, HUM 2, Sweet Dreams, Close-ups, Raw Data, Apparent Horizon, Minutia 0-13, Liquid Metal, Aeolian Confluence, Resonant Places, Desertscapes, Phase Transitions, Songs of Flight, Ahh-Ahh (ver 2.1), Airwaves (realities), White Night, Subterranean Network, Crystal, Solar Wind, Ling, Scirocco, Transparencies, and HUM.
She has had performances of her works throughout the Americas, Europe, Japan, and Australasia. She has 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 has received three honorary mentions from Bourges, and one from Prix Ars Electronica.
Her works are available on Starkland, Lovely Music, 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.