About Joel Snyder

Joel Snyder, a member of Actors' Equity Association, the American Federation of TV and Radio Artists, and the Screen Actors Guild, is a nationally recognized arts administrator and educator in the United States. For almost twenty years, he was the coordinator for funding of the nation's arts centers and festivals for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Before joining the NEA, he was an arts center director, stage manager, professional actor and voice talent, and an award-winning university and secondary school educator in English, speech and theater arts.

But Mr. Snyder is perhaps best known internationally as was one of the first "audio describers." Beginning in the early 1970s, he recorded "talking books" for the Library of Congress and read privately for individuals who are blind. He began describing theater events and media in 1980 with the world's first ongoing audio description service in Washington, DC. His abilities as a describer make hundreds of live theater productions accessible to visually impaired audience members; in media, Mr. Snyder has used the same technique to enhance PBS' American Playhouse productions, ABC and Fox network broadcasts, feature films, the IMAX film Blue Planet and the Planetarium show And A Star To Steer Her By at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum. Joel produced description for nationally broadcast films and network series including Sesame Street broadcasts and DVDs, as well as first-run feature films including: Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, World Trade Center, Flags Of Our Fathers, Dreamgirls, Shrek the Third, and Transformers. Most recently, he founded the first certification program for media describers.

Mr. Snyder's Audio Description Associates also develops audio described tours for major museums throughout the United States including the writing/voicing of an audio described tour of the Enabling Garden at the Chicago Botanic Garden, the National Aquarium in Baltimore, the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Albright/Knox Gallery in Buffalo, the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, FL, and National Park Service and US Forest Service facilities.

Mr. Snyder trained museum docents in audio description techniques at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History and Sackler/Freer Galleries, and the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Design and the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City. He also coached Secret Service agents/White House tour guides in AD methods and prepared an AD tour of the White House before public tours of the White House were discontinued following 9/11.

Internationally, he introduced description techniques for the performing arts in Japan, Israel, Romania, Spain, Portugal, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Norway and Finland; conducted audio description workshops in London, Prague, and St. Petersburg, Russia; and trained describers for a first-ever audio description program in Sofia, Bulgaria in August/September 1998. Most recently, he developed a team of describers for the second annual Moscow International Disability Film Festival as the result of intensive seminars conducted in Russia. In August 2008, he will present a paper on audio description at the thirteenth congress of the International Federation of Translators in Shanghai, China. Mr. Snyder is the Founding Chair of the Steering Committee and a current board member of the US-based service organization Audio Description International.