Composer and percussionist Sarah Hennies was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1979. She started playing drums when she was nine years old; in her teens she played drums with local college punk rock bands. She attended the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign before receiving a Master's degree from University of California, San Diego. After graduating from UC San Diego in 2003, she moved to Austin, Texas, and began collaborating with guitarist Aaron Rusell in the group Weird Weeds.

In the ten years she was in Austin, she performed with the Austin New Music Co-op, The Weird Weeds and a variety of other projects. She later became a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Bard College, a private liberal arts college in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. She lives in Ithaca, in upstate New York.

Hennies' list of works indicates that her first solo composition was "Roles (1998)" for piano, and her first composition for an ensemble was "Lives (2) (2003)" for percussion ensemble. Since 2006, she has released a stream of recordings as a performer, of works by such esteemed composers as