Annie Staninec

She grew up in a musical family in the Bay Area, where her father sang and played guitar, and took Suzuki lessons on the fiddle as a small child, learning simple fiddle tunes from his picking. She was going to the Father’s Day Bluegrass Festival in Grass Valley and other California festivals and jams from early childhood, met Chubby Wise there at five, and later studied with the fiddler Chad Manning. She was performing by eleven and working professionally by twelve, and before she was twenty-one she had toured with Darol Anger’s Republic of Strings and played in the Gypsy Kidz, the opening band on the 2006 Gypsy Caravan tour headlined by David Grisman and Stephane Wrembel. In 2006 she received the Dudley Hill Award for Outstanding Young Musicians at Djangofest Northwest, and the Northern California Bluegrass Society named her its Fiddle Player of the Year from 2008 to 2010.

With the band Town Mountain she played fiddle on Heroes & Heretics (2008), with Robert Greer, Jesse Langlais, Phil Barker and Barrett Smith, and she toured with the band. She joined the Kathy Kallick Band in 2008 and is on its albums Between the Hollow and the High-Rise (2010), Time, Foxhounds, Horrible World (2018) and The Lonesome Chronicles (2023), as well as tracks on Kallick’s Cut to the Chase and on Laurie Lewis & Kathy Kallick Sing the Songs of Vern & Ray. She has also played with Mary Gauthier and has filled in for Greg Spatz in John Reischman and the Jaybirds, including a tour of Britain in 2019.

In 2015 she released an instructional book on traditional bluegrass fiddle and her first album, Annie Staninec, received the IBMA Momentum Award, and became a member of the Rod Stewart Band, with which she has made several tours. Twin Sisters (2023), an album of fiddle and banjo duets with Nick Hornbuckle, was recorded remotely during the pandemic. She has recorded as a sideman on more than a hundred albums, and in Portland she plays with the band Whiskey Deaf and the Stumptown Stringband. She teaches privately and at camps including the California Bluegrass Association Music Camp, Kaufman Kamp, Darol Anger’s California Fiddle Retreat and RockyGrass Academy.