Anton Sanko was born and raised in New York City. He attended New York University, where he studied music theory and composition by day and played in downtown Manhattan's new wave clubs at night. Sanko also studied guitar and composition privately with jazz legend Ralph Towner, as well as classical guitar with Segovia protege Julio Prol. At NYU, Anton discovered the virtually unused electronic music lab, where he spent the majority of his free time experimenting with the 60’s era analog synthsizers and the then groundbreaking Fairlight CMI.
Sanko joined the Suzanne Vega’s band in 1985. He recorded the album Solitude Standing (7 Grammy nomintions) with her the following year and was widely credited by Vega for the success of the song Luka. In 1989 Anton produced and co-wrote Vega’s Days of Open Hand. He toured promoting the album as Vega's musical director, keyboard and guitar player.
After his work with Suzanne Vega, Sanko went on to produce artists like Anna Domino, Jim Carroll, Lucy Kaplansky, and Skeleton Key.
Around this time, Anton choose to pursue a lifelong passion - scoring for film. Sanko had befriended director Jonathan Demme years ago when he had directed Vega’s Solitude Standing video. The two remained in contact and Demme gave Anton his first film job, scoring his documentary “Cousin Bobby”. Sanko has since scored over 25 films. Amongst them are “Saving Face”, “Party Girl” and cult favorites “Strangeland” and “Scotland, Pa.”
More recently, Anton completed the score to the upcoming Sony Classics release “Saving Face”, which was directed by Alice Wu, produced by Will Smith and Teddy Zee, and features a wonderful comic performance by Joan Chen. “Saving Face” was an official selection at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival where it was received brilliantly. This past year Anton scored Tom DiCillo's new film “Delirious”, starring Steve Buscemi and Michael Pitt, as well as Alex Steyermark's comedy “One Last Thing”, starring Cynthia Nixon, Brian Stokes Mitchell and Wyclef Jean and Larry Fessenden’s horror-thriller “The Last Winter”.
MOVIESCORE MEDIA ALBUMS BY ANTON SANKO:
