Damien LeChateau Sneed is an Emmy- and Dove Award–winning composer, conductor, music
director, producer, performing artist, arts educator, orchestrator, scholar, minister, and cultural strategist whose life and work stand at the intersection of sacred authority, classical excellence, media fluency, and institutional leadership. Widely regarded as one of the most consequential multi-hyphenate artists of his generation, Sneed’s career moves seamlessly between the sanctuary and stage, the conservatory and concert hall, the broadcast studio and opera house, embodying a vocation that is at once artistic, theological, pedagogical, and civic in scope.
Born and raised in Augusta, Georgia, Sneed’s musical and spiritual formation began in the Black church. This early immersion in sacred sound—spirituals, hymns, gospel traditions, and charismatic worship—formed the bedrock of his artistic imagination and continues to shape his understanding of music as both testimony and calling.
A proud son of Howard University where he earned his bachelor’s degree, Sneed also completed a master’s program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and undertook doctoral studies in orchestral conducting at the University of Southern California. He has collaborated with an extraordinary range of artists, including Aretha Franklin, Jessye Norman, Wynton Marsalis, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Ashford & Simpson, Jennifer Holliday, Faith Evans, Lawrence Brownlee, Denyce Graves, and J’Nai Bridges. He has served as music director for Grammy Award–winning gospel artists, including Richard Smallwood, Yolanda Adams, Hezekiah Walker, Marvin Sapp, Elbernita “Twinkie” Clark, Karen Clark Sheard, and Kim Burrell. He is a 2014 Sphinx Medal of Excellence recipient, 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’ The Return.
Sneed is the founder and artistic director of Chorale Le Chateau, a professional vocal ensemble that is internationally recognized for its vivid interpretations of repertoire that spans Renaissance sacred works, art song, jazz, spirituals, gospel, symphonic collaborations, and contemporary idioms. Under his leadership, the ensemble became the principal choral force for Wynton Marsalis’s monumental Abyssinian Mass: A Gospel Celebra7on. Sneed’s work extended beyond performance into broadcast history as conductor, music director, producer, and on- camera creative voice for the Emmy-winning PBS documentary Everyone Has a Place. His other television credits include music director of BET’s Sunday Best (season four), Celebra7on of Gospel, Bobby Jones Gospel, Joyful Noise, and the Soul Train Music Awards.
As a composer, Sneed has emerged as one of the leading voices shaping sacred and socially engaged classical music in the 21st century. His commissions include Empower (Lyric Opera of Chicago), Marian’s Song (Houston Grand Opera), The Tongue & The Lash (Opera Theatre of Saint Louis), Testament (Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater), and a 2023 iteration of Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha (Opera Theatre of Saint Louis).
In April 2025, Sneed’s orchestral work Reflec7ons of Resilience: Five Spirituals received its world premiere at Carnegie Hall Isaac Stern Auditorium – Perelman Stage, performed by the Gateways Festival Orchestra and multiple Grammy Award–winning mezzo soprano J’Nai Bridges. The work reimagines the spiritual tradition through symphonic language, honoring its origins while expanding its expressive and orchestral possibilities.
His chamber opera The Tongue & The Lash, created with librettist Karen Chilton, was inspired by the historic James Baldwin–William F. Buckley debate in 1965 in Cambridge and delves into the timeless and urgent questions of race, privilege, and morality in America. This moving opera, grounded in prophetic scripture, will be mounted again by Opera Theatre of Saint Louis on March 19, 2026.
As a record label founder, recording artist, and producer, Sneed has built a discography that documents his multi-genre work in classical, jazz-inflected, sanctified soul, and other hybrid musical forms on his boutique label, LeChateau Earl Records. Through his production company, LeChateau Entertainment, he conceives, produces, and releases recordings and multimedia projects for major institutions, networks, and partners. Kaleidoscope—his next project with Apple Music—is scheduled for release this June. It features works by a constellation of Black composers—Robert Nathaniel Ded, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Hale Smith, Scott Joplin, and Richard Smallwood—alongside Sneed’s own composition commissioned by the Library of Congress, placed in conversation with other composers such as Beethoven, Gurlitt, and Copland.
Sneed serves as a tenured associate professor at Howard University’s Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts and is also on the faculty of The Juilliard School. For more information – visit damiensneed.com.