Adam Wead began studying the lute in Florence, Italy, under Gian Luca Lastrioli where he first performed with the ensemble Li Strumenti in a concert tour of Tuscany featuring Italian music from the early seventeenth century. Upon returning to the U.S., he moved to Baltimore and studied musicology, Renaissance lute and basso continuo under Mark Cudek, Ronn McFarlane and Web Wiggins at the Peabody Conservatory of Music at Johns Hopkins University. Further studies in Early Music brought him to the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University where he has studied Renaissance lute, theorbo, and Baroque lute, as well as basso continuo with Nigel North.

Mr. Wead has performed across the United States and Canada, in solo performances at the National Shrine to Music Museum in Vermilion, South Dakota, the Boston Early Music Festival, and Trinity College in Toronto, Ontario. His performances have been broadcast nationally on NPR's syndicated show Harmonia and he has recorded for the Koch record label. He performs regularly with Gravitacion, an early music vocal quartet based in Champaign, Illinois, and the Studio for Early Music in Toronto. He is a founding member of both Ostraka, and the ensemble Marley's Head, which has presented early music education programs to thousands of elementary and high school students throughout Kentucky under the sponsorship of New Performing Arts, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing arts education to rural counties in Kentucky. He has also presented lectures on different aspects of early music performance practice at the University of Edmonton, Bridgewater College, and the CapRock Early Music Association in Lubbock, Texas.

In addition to performing, Mr. Wead is currently doing research in the areas of early music and computing technology. With a background in library and information technology, he is exploring the ways in which technology can improve our understanding of historical performance practice. In August of 2007, he presented a paper at the International Computer Music Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark that demonstrated a system for visualizing the rules of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century continuo treatises and applying their rules automatically to unfigured basses.

Mr. Wead is currently on staff at the William and Gayle Cook Music library at Indiana University.