Joel Snyder

One of the first audio describers, Joel Snyder began describing theatre events and media in 1981. In addition to his ongoing work in these genres (“Sesame Street,” DVDs, dozens of feature films in movie theatres and hundreds of nationally broadcast television programmes), each year he develops audio described tours for major museums throughout the United States including the Smithsonian Institution, the Getty, the Albright-Knox, the National Aquarium, and several State museums and myriad National Park and Forest Service exhibit centres.

He has introduced audio description/conducted audio description workshops in 30 states and Washington, D.C. and over 25 countries; in summer 2008, Snyder presented workshops in Montpellier, Shanghai, Beijing and provided description for the World Blind Union in Geneva. Most recently, he trained describers in Brazil and presented papers on description in Italy at the International Conference on the Arts & Society and in Spain at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. He is a Ph.D. candidate in audio-visual translation (focus on audio description) at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona.