Allucquére Rosanne "Sandy" Stone (born c. 1936) is an American academic theorist, media theorist, author, and performance artist. She is currently Associate Professor and Founding Director of the Advanced Communication Technologies Laboratory (ACTLab) and the New Media Initiative in the department of Radio-TV-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. Concurrently she is Wolfgang Kohler Professor of Media and Performance at the European Graduate School EGS, senior artist at the Banff Centre, and Humanities Research Institute Fellow at the University of California, Irvine. Stone has worked in and written about film, music, experimental neurology, writing, engineering, and computer programming. Stone is transgender and is considered a founder of the academic discipline of transgender studies. She has been profiled in Artforum, Wired, Mondo 2000, and other publications, and been interviewed for documentaries like Traceroute. Early life and career Stone was born in Jersey City, New Jersey in 1936. Stone is Jewish and has stated her birth name was "Zelig Ben-Nausaan Cohen in Hebrew." Stone has stated that she disliked formal education and preferred auditing classes with university professors whose work she admired. She has stated she worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories, then worked odd jobs to support her own research. She later graduated from St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, receiving a B.A. in 1965. Recording engineer, science fiction, and computing In the late 1960s Stone moved to New York City and embarked on a career as a recording engineer, initially on the East Coast, and later on the West Coast. In 1969, Stone wrote about an April 7 recording session at Record Plant Studios with Jimi Hendrix for Zygote magazine. According to journalist David S. Bennahum, Stone "used to wear a long black cape and full beard." In the early 1970s, Stone published several science fiction pieces under the pen name Sandy Fisher in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Galaxy magazine. In 1974 Stone withdrew from mainstream recording, settled in Santa Cruz, California, and underwent gender reassignment with Donald Laub at the Stanford Gender Dysphoria Program in Palo Alto. The name "Allucquére" comes from a character in her friend Robert A. Heinlein's novel, The Puppet Masters (1951). Later she became a member of the Olivia Records collective, a popular women's music label, and began collaboration within lesbian feminist circles. She was Olivia's sound engineer from ca. 1974-1978, recording and mixing all Olivia product during this period. In