Laura Schwendinger is an Assistant Professor of Music in the Department of Performing Arts at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she teaches composition and theory and directs the electronic music studio. For ten years she was on the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

She has also been a lecturer at the Music Department of the University of California Santa Cruz, at Smith College, and an Associate Researcher at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, where her principal teacher was Andrew Imbrie. She has also studied with John Adams, Olly Wilson, Milton Babbitt and Chinary Ung.

Her honors include commissions from the Koussevitzky (2001), the Fromm Music Foundation (1999), and the Harvard Musical Association (1999), as well as The American Academy in Berlin Prize Fellowship (1999, the first composer to receive this honor), the Charles Ives Scholarship from The American Academy of Arts and Letters (1993), the Judges’ Commendation from the Barlow Endowment (1995), a Norton Stevens Fellowship from the MacDowell Colony (1994), Meet the Composer Grants (1997,1998), an American Composers Forum Grant (1998), a Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center (1997), the Bogliasco Foundation (2001), an Illinois Arts Council Grant (2001), and First Prize of the ALEA III International Composition Competition (1995, the first American winner in over a decade). In addition, she has received two grants from the Vice Chancellor of University of Illinois at Chicago (1999, 2000), one in support of a new concert work and the other in support of a recording project with the Chicago Chamber Musicians.

Her Chanson Innocente was performed by Dawn Upshaw and Gilbert Kalish at Carnegie Hall in New York, Herbst Theater in San Francisco, Veteran’s Wadsworth Theater in Los Angeles, Wigmore Hall in London, The Theatre Chatelet in Paris, at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Massachusetts, and will be performed again in June 2001 at the Ojai Festival in California. Her works Magic Carpet Music and Songs of Heaven and Earth, written for The Theater Chamber Players, were premiered at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C. She has also been performed by such groups and performers as The Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra of Hungary, The Cleveland Chamber Symphony, The New England String Ensemble, The New York Camerata , The Washington Square Contemporary Music Society, ALEA III, the Chicago CUBE Ensemble, Washington D.C.'s New Music Forum, Scott Kluksdahl, The New Millennium Ensemble, Northwestern University New Music Ensemble, Vancouver New Music, Fear No Music, and the Berkeley and Marin Symphony Orchestras.

She has had residencies at the MacDowell, Yaddo, and Millay Colonies, as well as the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Virginia Centers for the Creative Arts and in July 1997, she was a fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy.

Her music has been called "music of considerable power" by The San Francisco Chronicle, as "fanciful" by The New York Times, as having " an impressive luster and transparency", "poignant.." and "revel(ing) in sinewy counterpoint" by The Washington Post, as "reflect(ing) both inner pain and breast beating wails" by the Bethesda Gazette, as "delectable" by the Cleveland Plain Dealer and as having "...an extravagant expressiveness" by The Seattle Weekly.

Her Chamber Concerto, reviewed in The American Record Guide as "melodic and atmospheric", is available on the Capstone label and her Chanson Innocente is soon to be released on a recital video, "Voices of Our Time", performed by Dawn Upshaw at the Theatre du Chatelet.