Composer/pianist Sarah Meneely-Kyder (b. 1945) is a graduate of Goucher College, Peabody Conservatory and Yale University. Her composition teachers have included Robert Hall Lewis, Earle Brown and Robert Morris. In the years following her formal education in the Western musical tradition, she studied the North Indian sitar and was eventually initiated by Roop Verma, a student of world-renowned sitarist, Ravi Shankar. She has also studied the South Indian veena. As a composer, most notable are those works that fuse disparate musical traditions into single pieces. Numerous choral works have been performed by respected choral organizations throughout Greater New England. In April of 2013, she premiered her large-scale oratorio Letter from Italy, 1944 to a sold-out house, with a strikingly enthusiastic audience response. This composition was the inspiration for a filmed documentary by Karyl Evans, narrated by Meryl Streep.

A member of American Composers Alliance, and a founding member of Connecticut Composers, Inc., her creative endeavors have been rewarded with several grants and prizes including Yale University’s Rena Greenwald Memorial Prize and several Artist Project Grants from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts.