Photo: Jordan Reznick

Sandy Stone is a cultural theoretician, audio engineer, computer hacker, filmmaker and performance artist; founding director of the Advanced Communication Technologies Laboratory (ACTLab) at the University of Texas at Austin; Fellow of the University of California Humanities Research Institute; a founder of the academic discipline of Transgender Studies; and recipient of the State of California Lifetime Achievement Award. She has been interviewed in various publications and films such as ArtForum, Wired, Mondo, Gendernauts, etc. Jon Lebkowsky has described her as "a force of nature."

On becoming an academic: "I had a vision in which I saw my life pass before me like a circus train, and each car was painted as a different career that I'd had in my life. And they went by - you know, the computer person, the performance person - all of those things, the recording engineer, the fiction writer, on and on. And when the caboose went by, there was a clown, standing on a little platform on the back of the caboose with a red nose, and as that went by, the clown waved at me, and I waved back, and I said 'Bye-bye, bye-bye' to my previous life. This is my new life now. And the train went off into the distance, and disappeared. And I was an academic. That was my moment. And I never looked back."

* Website: sandystone.com

* Wikipedia article on "The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto"

* Allucquere Rosanne Stone interview for Mondo 2000: This is the version that MONDO 2000 didn't publish.