Andrea Olmstead is the author of four books about the modernist American composer Roger Sessions: Roger Sessions: A Biography (Routledge, 2007), Roger Sessions and His Music (UMI Research Press, 1985), Conversations with Roger Sessions (Northeastern University Press, 1987), The Correspondence of Roger Sessions (Northeastern, 1992), as well as the Revised New Grove Dictionary (2001) Sessions entry. She is also the author of Juilliard: A History (University of Illinois Press, 1999) and of numerous articles in The Journal of Musicology, Perspectives of New Music, The Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, Tempo, Musical America, and The Musical Quarterly.

The recipient of three national Endowment for the Humanities Awards, she has also been a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome six times and a Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts on four occasions. She taught Music History at The Juilliard School from 1972 to 1980. Most recently she was the Christopher Hogwood Research Fellow for the Handel and Hadyn Society Orchestra and Chorus. She is married to Rome Prize composer Larry Thomas Bell.