Dr Paula Wolfe

Dr Paula Wolfe is a critically acclaimed singer-songwriter and producer, an award nominated author and academic with an international profile in the fields of music production, the independent music industry, gender and creativity.

Nominated for The Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research Award 2020, from the Association for Recorded Sound (ARSC) and the IASPM Book Prize 2021, her book, "Women in The Studio: creativity, control and gender in popular music sound production" (Routledge 2020), explores the cultural and historical frameworks that underpin sustained inequalities of gender, class and race in the music industry and pays particular attention to their consequences for female music producers and for female self-producing artists. Through examining the wide-ranging impact of music production as a gendered field of practice, the book incorporates themes that include music production, self-production, music technology, creativity, the music industry, entrepreneurship, media representation, gender and diversity.

To support both the book’s publication and new areas of research that draw on her own creative practices within self-production, Dr Wolfe has been delivering guest lectures at universities throughout the UK, as well as in Europe, the US and Canada, since the autumn of 2019. This is addition to her having been invited to contribute to a number of panels at both academic and public-facing music industry events. These include a designated panel at The Art of Record Production Conference (Aalborg University, Denmark, 2016); a joint event organised by The IVORS Academy and The Swedish Society of Composers at London South Bank Centre (2017) and at an industry roundtable discussion on "Songwriting, Streaming and Sustainability" as part of the Songwriting Studies Research Network event hosted by The Ivors Academy (2019).

Dr Wolfe has also been invited to be an external PhD examiner (Massey University, New Zealand), an editorial advisor for Routledge (New York) and a peer reviewer for a number of academic journals. These include Popular Music (Cambridge University Press), Ethnomusicology (University of Illinois Press), Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture (University of Nebraska Press) and IASPM Journal. In addition, she was invited to speak as a featured author at the launch event for the newly formed Society For Music Production Research (SMPR).

Along with her role as a senior lecturer at The London College of Music, Dr Wolfe has worked as a module leader and project supervisor on the MA in Creative Music Production at The Institute of Contemporary Music Performance (ICMP) and is an associate lecturer on the MA in Music Production at The London College of Communication, University of The Arts. 

Professional creative and industry practice:

Dr Wolfe is an artist in equal measure to being an academic. Self-producing and self-releasing her music on her own label, Sib Records, since the early 2000s, her work has consistently received strong support. Current projects include releasing the completed re-working of her early catalogue, her fourth album and a volume of poetry. She is signed to the music publisher May Music and is represented by the international sync agency Creaminal.