Maria Lynn Schneider was born November 27, 1960, in Windom, Minnesota, a small farming town whose flat, wide landscape she has cited as a lasting influence on her music's sense of space. She went on to earn a degree in music theory and composition from the University of Minnesota in 1983. She spent a year of graduate study at the University of Miami before completing a master's degree in composition at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, in 1985. That same year she received a National Endowment for the Arts apprenticeship grant to study privately with composer and valve trombonist Bob Brookmeyer, whose long-form thematic writing for large jazz ensemble became a foundational influence on her own approach.

After Eastman, Schneider moved to New York City, where the arranger and bandleader Gil Evans hired her as a copyist and composing assistant. She worked for Evans from 1985 until his death in 1988, helping prepare his scores and later serving as an uncredited co-arranger on his projects, including his soundtrack work for Martin Scorsese's 1986 film The Color of Money and arrangements for a 1987 European tour backing the singer Sting. The apprenticeship placed her directly inside the orchestral, harmonically dense writing style that would shape her own voice for the rest of her career. In 1988 she formed her first band with trombonist John Fedchock, then her husband, performing at the Greenwich Village club Visiones.

Schneider founded the Maria Schneider Jazz Orchestra in 1992, and beginning in 1993 the eighteen-piece ensemble held a weekly Monday-night residency at Visiones that ran until the club closed in 1998, a stretch that let her develop compositions tailored to the specific, identifiable voices of individual musicians in the band rather than interchangeable chart parts. Her debut album, Evanescence (Enja, 1994), documented this approach and drew immediate critical attention for its lush, non-formulaic writing. She followed it with Coming About (Enja, 1996) and Allégresse (2000), the latter built from commissions including the Metropole Orchestra, the American Dance Festival, and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Schneider became one of the earliest and most visible artists on ArtistShare, the fan-funding platform founded by Brian Camelio, beginning with the live album Days of Wine and Roses (2000) and continuing with Concert in the Garden (2004), which in 2005 became the first internet-only-release recording to win a Grammy Award, for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album; it was inducted into the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry in 2019. From 2005 to 2019 her orchestra held an annual Thanksgiving-week residency at New York's Jazz Standard. Sky Blue (2007) won a Grammy for Best Instrumental Composition for "Cerulean Skies," on which orchestra members contributed recorded bird calls, reflecting Schneider's lifelong avocation as a birdwatcher.

In 2013 Schneider released Winter Morning Walks, a chamber-orchestral collaboration with soprano Dawn Upshaw setting poems by Ted Kooser and Carlos Drummond de Andrade with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and the Australian Chamber Orchestra; it won her a Grammy for Best Contemporary Classical Composition, one of a small number of artists to win Grammys in both jazz and classical categories. The following year she arranged David Bowie's "Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)" for his 2014 compilation Nothing Has Changed, a collaboration that won the 2015 Grammy for Best Arrangement, Instrumental and Vocals. The Thompson Fields (2015), named for the farmland around her Minnesota hometown, brought a second Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album Grammy. Her double album Data Lords (2020), split into a "Digital World" half confronting the effects of streaming and data-driven technology on musicians and culture and a "Natural World" half rooted in her environmental concerns, won two more Grammys, was a 2021 Pulitzer Prize finalist, and won France's Grand Prix de l'Académie du Jazz.

Alongside her composing career, Schneider became one of the music industry's most persistent advocates for musicians' digital rights, testifying before a U.S. House subcommittee on copyright law in 2014, participating in U.S. Copyright Office roundtables, and filing a 2020 class-action lawsuit against YouTube over its Content ID system (voluntarily dismissed in 2023). Consistent with that advocacy, she has kept her ArtistShare-era catalog, from Concert in the Garden (2004) onward, off Spotify, Tidal, and YouTube Music entirely, releasing it exclusively through ArtistShare and physical formats rather than accept what she has called token per-stream payouts. She was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2019, elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020 and the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2023, and in 2026 received the Rolf Schock Prize in Musical Arts, presented jointly by Sweden's Royal Academies of Sciences, Fine Arts, and Music. Her most recent release, the EP American Crow (2026), sets a piece commissioned by Emory University and first performed by her orchestra in 2022.

Schneider's writing fuses the harmonic richness and blurred orchestral colors she absorbed from Gil Evans with the extended, thematically developed forms she studied under Bob Brookmeyer, producing a body of work critics have described as "evocative, majestic, magical, heart-stoppingly gorgeous... and beyond categorization." Rather than writing generic big-band charts, she composes directly for the specific instrumental and improvisational voices of her orchestra's members, many of whom have held the same chair for two decades or more, so that a given piece is inseparable from the musician who premiered it. Her music draws on sources well outside conventional big-band vocabulary, including flamenco rhythm, South American folk forms, and the natural-world imagery of birdsong and open landscape, and it has increasingly carried an explicit point of view on technology, streaming economics, and musicians' rights. She is widely credited with revitalizing large-ensemble jazz composition for a generation of younger orchestral jazz writers.