Joan Snyder was born on April 16, 1940, in Highland Park, New Jersey. She received her AB from Douglass College in 1962 and her MFA from Rutgers University in 1966.

After graduating from Douglass College in 1962 with a BA in Sociology, Snyder received her MFA from Rutgers University in 1966.

While living on a New Jersey farm in 1962, Snyder worked in a studio on the Raritan River in New Brunswick, creating some of her earliest paintings of farm and landscape scenes, as well as expressionist portraits. In the mid to late 60’s she was working explicitly with the idea of female sensibility, using materials in her paintings such as lentil seeds, flocking, thread, glitter and gauze. Snyder describes her processes involving non-art materials as a type of ritual act for the painting. Snyder’s ideas often take form in her paintings through other means other than paint such as music, poetry and words to further push the intent of her pieces. These works eventually led to Snyder’s seminal stroke paintings in the late 60’s and early ’70’s. Snyder worked alongside artists such as Mary Heilmann, Jennifer Bartlett and Harriet Korman during the 1960s, all of whom were attempting to bring more process into their art making.Some of Snyder’s work includes:

In 1969 Snyder married photographer Larry Fink. She gave birth to their daughter, Molly, in 1979. They were divorced in 1985. Her grandson Elijah was born in 2012. In 2011 Snyder married her partner of 28 years, Margaret Cammer, a retired New York State Acting Supreme Court Judge and the former NY Deputy Administrative Judge of The New York City Civil Court.

In 1971, Snyder founded the Mary H. Dana Women Artist Series, “the oldest continuous running exhibition space in the United States dedicated to making visible the work of emerging and established contemporary women artists.”

In the early 1970s, Snyder began to explore paint as subject, reconstructing abstract painting through gestural strokes on canvas over a gridded background. These paintings, more commonly known as her ‘stroke’ paintings, were included in the 1973 and 1981 Whitney Biennials as well as the Corcoran Biennial in 1975.