Vanessa Theme Ament
- Sound Department
- Additional Crew
- Casting Department
Vanessa Ament was born in Glendale, California, and raised in the
central coast county of San Luis Obispo. She grew up the granddaughter
of the early film pioneer
Earl L. McMurtrie. Vanessa was a
singer and dancer in her youth and performed in many plays and cabaret
shows. At Whittier College, she earned a B.A. in Theatre, and after
graduation, worked for the Glendale Regional Arts Council as an
"Artist-in-the-Schools" in the field of theatre. She "fell" into the
work of a Foley Artist by mistake when she auditioned to replace a
voice for a film and her accurate sync caught the attention of the
mixer, Robert Deschaine and the manager
of Gomillion Sound James L. Honore. She
started training as a Foley Artist at Gomillion, thinking it would be
"a good gig between acting and singing jobs." This fill-in job became
her primary career for over twenty years. Along the way, she began
voice casting and acting, Foley and ADR editing, and writing and
singing her own songs in the L.A. cabaret and jazz scene. In her
thirties, Vanessa earned an M.Div. as a Unitarian Universalist at Starr
King School for the Ministry, in Berkeley. Vanessa has always loved
teaching, and had various stints as a Sound Supervisor for students at
AFI and USC, as well as an educator at various schools and colleges,
including Cuesta College, in San Luis Obispo, as well as both DePaul
University and Columbia College in Chicago. In 2014, she received her Ph.D. in Communication from Georgia State University, and became the Edmund and Virginia Ball Endowed Chair, Professor of Telecommunications at Ball State University. Vanessa has been a member
of MPSE, CAS, BMI, AFM, SAG, Equity, Society of Composers and
Lyricists, Women in Film, and The Academy of Television Arts and
Sciences. She has won three Golden Reel Certificates for Foley for the
films
The Dollmaker (1984),
Predator (1987), and
Die Hard (1988), and has had several
nominations for other films. Vanessa has been featured at film
festivals, sound festivals and in various publications. From the
mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, she published MovieSound Newsletter. Music
is Vanessa's true calling and she released her first CD in 2004. The Foley Grail, her first book, was published in 2009, and the second edition was released in 2014. The
most challenging thing Vanessa ever did, other than keep the faith that
"work would come," was home school her son for seven years.