Born in 1936 in Weehawken, New Jersey, Sandy Stone was a smart but socially uncomfortable child. Assigned male at birth, she felt like a girl but told nobody. By age 3, she could read aloud the books she could reach in her father’s library, though she did not comprehend the words…yet. Her parents, uncertain of what to do with their unique child, brought her to doctors and psychiatrists. These were humiliating appointments: being treated differently and labeled a genius further separated her from a world that already felt foreign.

At 11, she worked for Richard Ranger, the inventor who developed the tape recorder, preliminary fax, and contemporary method for syncing sound and film. As a teen, Sandy took apart machines to create sound, light, and image performances in the family’s living room, long before "installation" or “interdisciplinary" art existed. In college, she recorded, engineered, and pressed records of music performed by friends. After college she needed a job and a place to live, she knocked on the door of the eminent Record Plant recording studio in New York City and was hired in maintenance, sleeping in the basement on a pile of Jimi Hendrix’s capes. Stone quickly became the music industry’s best-kept secret, recording with Hendrix, Van Morrison, Grateful Dead, Miles Davis, The Byrds, and Jefferson Airplane. Coming out as a lesbian woman, she joined the radical separatist music company Olivia Records, which pioneered the international Women’s Music movement. Sandy made albums by Meg Christian, Linda “Tui” Tillery, Cris Williamson, and Mary Watkins.