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Damien Sneed

About this Artist

As a multi-genre recording artist and instrumentalist, Damien LeChateau Sneed is a pianist, vocalist, organist, composer, conductor, arranger, producer, and arts educator whose work spans multiple genres. He has worked with jazz, classical, pop, and R&B legends, including the late Aretha Franklin and Jessye Norman. He is featured on Norman’s final recording, Bound For The Promised Land, on Albany Records. He also worked with Wynton Marsalis, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Ashford & Simpson, J’Nai Bridges, Lawrence Brownlee, and many others. In addition, Sneed has served as music director for several Grammy Award-winning gospel artists and BET’s hit gospel competition, Sunday Best – Season Four. Sneed is a 2014 Sphinx Medal of Excellence recipient. He is a 2020 Dove Award winner and a 2021 NAACP Image Award winner for his work as a featured producer and writer on the Clark Sisters’ newest project, “The Return”. Sneed is currently a faculty member of the Manhattan School of Music, Berklee College of Music and Artist-in-Residence at Michigan State University. Sneed is featured in the award-winning PBS documentary Everyone Has a Place, which stars Wynton Marsalis, capturing Sneed’s journey as the musical conductor of the historic tour performances of Marsalis’ “Abyssinian Mass.” The film features the world-renowned Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and Sneed’s own Chorale Le Chateau. During the 2018 – 2019 season, Sneed served as Houston Grand Opera’s cover conductor and HGOco’s composer-in-residence and music director. There he was commissioned to compose the new opera, MARIAN’S SONG, about the life of Marian Anderson. In 2020, Alvin Ailey Dance Theater commissioned Sneed to create an original score for Testament, a contemporary response to the 60th Anniversary of Revelations. In 2021, he was commissioned by Opera Theatre of Saint Louis to compose the new opera, THE TONGUE & THE LASH, imagining a post-debate conversation between James Baldwin and William Buckley.

In 2022, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis commissioned Sneed to compose a reimagined adaptation of Scott Joplin’s TREEMONISHA, which will premiere on May 20, 2023. On June 17, 2022, Sneed conducted Nathaniel Dett’s Ordering of Moses at Cathedral of Saint John the Divine with a 50-piece orchestra and his 75-piece choral group, Chorale Le Chateau, to commemorate the Harlem Renaissance centennial. In early October, he will conduct the Flint Symphony Orchestra with Patti Austin in a tribute to Ella Fitzgerald. During the upcoming 2022 – 2023 season he will tour ‘Our Song Our Story’, an evening of operatic arias, art songs and spirituals featuring Justin Austin, Raehann Bryce-Davis, Janinah Burnett, Jacqueline Echols and Raven McMillon accompanied by a string quartet with Damien Sneed on piano.  Sneed was recently signed to Apple Music & Platoon Records (London). His new single was released in June 2022 exclusively on Apple Music’s digital platforms of his original classical composition, Sequestered Thoughts, commissioned by the Library of Congress with Sneed on solo piano.