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, as well as in the forthcoming American Grove. 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 eight 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. From 2005-2007 she was the Christopher Hogwood Research Fellow for the Handel and Hadyn Society Orchestra and Chorus.  A frequent pre-concert lecturer, she is a CD producer and the librettist of the two-act opera Holy Ghosts. Olmstead is married to Rome Prize composer Larry Thomas Bell.