Snider is currently at work on Hildegard, an opera about 12th c. visionary/polymath/composer St. Hildegard von Bingen, on a libretto Snider is writing herself. Commissioned by Beth Morrison Projects, the opera has received two grants from Opera America, will be workshopped by the Princeton University Lewis Center for the Arts Atelier program in 2023, and will premiere (venue TBA) in 2025. Other upcoming projects include a large multimedia orchestral work with video artist Deborah Johnson; a piano concerto; and a large work for the Colin Currie Group. 

Snider has four critically acclaimed full-length LP releases. October 2022 saw the Nonesuch/New Amsterdam Records co-release of The Blue Hour, a collaborative song cycle for Shara Nova and A Far Cry string orchestra, co-written with Rachel Grimes, Angélica Negrón, Shara Nova, and Caroline Shaw, on poetry by Carolyn Forché. The album was named to NPR’s Top Ten Albums of 2022 (all genres), and received critical acclaim from BBC Music Magazine,  The Boston Globe, The Nation, NPR, The Guardian, VAN, and many others.

In September 2020, Snider released Mass for the Endangered on Nonesuch/New Amsterdam Records, performed by English vocal ensemble Gallicantus. A prayer for the natural world with a libretto by poet Nathaniel Bellows (interpolated with the original Latin), Mass for the Endangered drew high praise from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Gramophone, BBC Music Magazine, The Boston Globe, Opera News, The San Francisco Classical Voice, and many others, with The New Yorker writing: “the work proclaims Snider’s technical command and unerring knack for breathtaking beauty,” and NPR declaring that “Snider must be recognized as one of today’s most compelling composers for the human voice” (NPR Top Ten Classical Albums of 2020.) 

Among Snider’s most celebrated works are two albums of genre-defying orchestral song cycles: Penelope (New Amsterdam, 2010) and Unremembered (New Amsterdam, 2015). Commissioned by the J. Paul Getty Center with lyrics by playwright Ellen McLaughlin about the long-suffering wife of Homer’s Odysseus, Penelope features vocalist Shara Nova and Ensemble Signal. Named the Top Classical Album of 2010 by Time Out New York and one of NPR’s Top Five Genre-Defying Albums of 2010, the album also drew acclaim from The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Gramophone Magazine, New York Magazine, and many others, with Pitchfork writing: “Snider’s music lives in an increasingly populous inter-genre space that, as of yet, has produced only a few clear, confident voices. Snider is perhaps the most sophisticated of them all.” Since its premiere, Penelope has received over 60 performances in the U.S. and abroad. 

Unremembered, a 60’ song cycle for genre-fluid vocalists Padma Newsome, Shara Nova, and D.M. Stith; chamber orchestra; and electronics, was inspired by poems and illustrations by Nathaniel Bellows about a haunted childhood in rural Massachusetts. Hailed as “a masterpiece” (Paste) and “an intricately magical landscape” (New York Magazine) that “attests to Ms. Snider’s thorough command of musical mood setting” (The New York Times), Unremembered was named to dozens of year-end lists including The Washington Post and The Nation, and was voted one of the “50 Best Classical Works of the Past Twenty Years” by WQXR radio in 2015 and 2016. In 2017, a live performance of Unremembered with Newsome, Nova, and Stith toured the U.S. and Europe.

Snider’s music can also be found on eleven other recordings, including Emily D’Angelo’s  Enargeia (Deutsche Grammophon), Cantus’s Manifesto (Signum), and Roomful of Teeth’s Grammy-Award-winning eponymous debut (New Amsterdam). Spring 2024 will see the release of her song “Everything That Ever Was,”on a poem by Tracy K. Smith, commissioned by Renée Fleming and Will Liverman, on an album for Cedille Records.   

The winner of the 2014 Detroit Symphony Orchestra Lebenbom Competition, Snider has also received grants and awards from Opera America, National Endowment for the Arts, Mid-Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Music USA, the Sorel Organization, the Jerome Composers Commissioning Fund, and many others. She has been Composer-in-Residence at Winnipeg New Music Festival; Denmark’s Engelsholm Castle Composition Program; the HighScore Festival in Pavia, Italy; Soundstreams Canada RBC Bridges Program; Vanderbilt University; University of Colorado-Boulder; the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival; Nief-Norf Festival; Decoda Skidmore Chamber Music Institute; the Bowling Green State University New Music Festival; and the So Percussion Summer Institute. She has given masterclasses and lectures on her work at Columbia University, CUNY, Duke University, Princeton University, Mannes School of Music, New York University, North Carolina School of the Arts, University of Illinois–Champaign Urbana, University of Texas–Austin, USC Thornton School of Music, and Yale School of Music, among other institutions. In Fall 2023, she will be Visiting Lecturer at Princeton University, co-teaching (with Gabriel Crouch) a course on her opera through the Lewis Center for the Arts.

In addition to her work as a composer, Snider is a passionate advocate for new music in New York and beyond. From 2001 to 2007, she co-curated the Look & Listen Festival, a new music series set in modern art galleries. Since 2007, she has served as Co-Artistic Director, along with William Brittelle and Judd Greenstein, of New Amsterdam Records, a Brooklyn-based non-profit record label recently called “emblematic of an emerging generation” (The New York Times) and praised for “releasing one quality disc after another” (Newsweek.) “Few organizations have done more to shape 21st-century music in New York City" (Time Out New York.)

Born and raised in Princeton, New Jersey, Snider has an M.M. and Artist Diploma from the Yale School of Music and a B.A. from Wesleyan University. In 2006, she was a Schumann Fellow at the Aspen Music Festival. Her teachers included Martin Bresnick, Marc-Andre Dalbavie, Justin Dello Joio, Aaron Jay Kernis, Ezra Laderman, David Lang, and Christopher Rouse. She lives in Princeton with her husband, Steven; son, Jasper; and daughter, Dylan.

Her music is published by G. Schirmer.