Susan Feder Trustee

2008 -

Susan Feder is a program officer in the Arts and Culture program at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (AC), with responsibility for performing arts and related organizations.  Working within AC, across the Foundation’s other program areas, and with leading national and regional arts service organizations, she has helped oversee a broad diversification of AC’s portfolio and range of supported activities.  Before joining the Foundation, as vice president of the music publisher G. Schirmer, Inc., she developed the careers of many leading composers in the United States, Europe, and the former Soviet Union.  Earlier in her career, she was editorial coordinator of The New Grove Dictionary of American Music (1986), program editor at the San Francisco Symphony, and an award-winning freelance writer on music.  Ms. Feder obtained degrees in musicology from Princeton University (where she currently serves on the Music Department Advisory Council), and the University of California, Berkeley.

Ms. Feder is vice president of the Amphion Foundation; sits on the boards of Grantmakers in the Arts, the Kurt Weill Foundation, and the Charles Ives Society; and is on the Advisory Council for the Mosaic Fund.  Her honors include the Concert Music Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), for which she was described as “Publisher, Advisor, Friend, and Champion,” an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for her program notes, and Musical America’s Profiles in Courage award (2014).  She is the dedicatee of John Corigliano’s Pulitzer-Prize winning Symphony No. 2, Augusta Read Thomas’s Helios Choros, and Joan Tower’s Dumbarton Oaks Quintet.