[1] Janika Vandervelde was born in Ripon, Wisconsin, and grew up in nearby Green Lake, playing horn and piano starting at age five.

She was associate conductor of the Mississippi Valley Chamber Orchestra, and also served as music director at Wesley United Methodist Church in Minneapolis.

She has been called "a passionate experimenter and ingenious explorer of new sonorities" and "a composer whose style reflects a freely inquisitive artistic personality.

"[7] Most notably, the feminist musicologist Susan McClary argued that Vandervelde's piano trio "Genesis II moves metaphorically through a series of natural, cultural, and historical worldviews, holding them in tension and contradiction.

Genesis II (premiered and recorded by the Mirecourt Trio) is discussed at length in Take Note, an undergraduate music-appreciation textbook by musicologist Robin Wallace, published in 2014 by Oxford University Press; the work is part of the book's "core repertory."