Cheryl Frances-Hoad was born in Essex in 1980 and received her musical education at the Yehudi Menuhin School, Gonville and Caius College (University of Cambridge) and Kings College London. She was Music Fellow at Rambert Dance from 2012 - 2013, and from 2010-12 was the first DARE Cultural Fellow in the Opera Related Arts in association
with Opera North and the University of Leeds. Cheryl won
the BBC Young Composer Competition in 1996 at the age of
15 and since then her works have garnered numerous prizes and awards, including the Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Prize (UK, 2007), the Sun River Composition Prize (China, 2007), The International String Orchestra Composition Competition (Malta, 2006), The Bliss Prize (UK, 2002), the first Robert Helps International Composition Prize (University of Florida, 2005), the Mendelssohn Scholarship (UK, 2002) and the Cambridge Composer's Competition (UK, 2001). Most recently in 2011 Cheryl was awarded a PRS Women Make Music award to write a new brass quintet for Onyx Brass, which was toured around the UK as part of the 2011/12 Music in the Round season.

In 2010 Cheryl became the youngest composer to win two awards in the same year at the BASCA British Composer Awards (her setting of Psalm 1 won the Choral category, and Stolen Rhythm for solo piano won the Solo or Duo category). In 2008 she was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Artists in Residence Fellowship at the University of Cambridge, enabling her to investigate aspects of the mind at the Psychiatry Department, which resulted in a new work for piano premiered at the 2009 Cambridge Clinical Neuroscience and Mental Health Symposium. Also In 2008, Cheryl was awarded the Wicklow County Council Per Cent for Arts Commission (Ireland), which enabled her to compose her first piano concerto, premiered by Bobby Chen and the Greystones Orchestra in May 2009.

Cheryl's work has been premiered in some of the world's most important chamber music venues, including the Wigmore Hall (Melancholia (piano trio), Excelsus (solo 'cello) and My fleeting Angel (piano trio)) and the Purcell Room (The Glory Tree (for soprano and six instruments), and The Ogre Lover (for string trio)). Her debut CD of chamber works, The Glory Tree, was released in 2011 by Champs Hill records and received excellent reviews in The Times, The Telegraph and The Guardian, in addition to being chosen as “Chamber Music Choice” by BBC Music Magazine in October 2011. Her second CD, of vocal works, is due for release in April 2014.Recent works include a ‘cello concerto for the 2013 Spitalfields Festival, a new Canticle that was premiered by the Prince Consort on the exact centenary of Britten’s birth (at the Wigmore Hall on 22nd November 2013) and Sailing to the Marvelous, a work that celebrated the 900th Anniversary of Bridlington Priory. Cheryl’s first opera, Amy's Last Dive, with a libretto by Adam Strickson, was premiered as part of the Yorkshire Cultural Olympiad Programme in July 2012 in Bridlington and Leeds. Future commissions include a new solo violin work for Fenella Humphries, a work for the London Chamber Orchestra and a work for Rambert (which will be choreograped by Rambert’s artistic director Mark Baldwin and toured all around in UK in 2014).