Joanne Forman was an award-winning composer, playwright, director, puppeteer, newswomen, political activist, and founder of her own music label, "User Friendly Music." She composed operas, liturgical and choral works, chamber music, ballets, song cycles, and many musicals and puppet shows for children, and wrote plays and short stories. Forman was a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Composer’s Fellowship; the National Federation of Music Clubs Award; New Mexico Humanities Award; Maine Commission on the Arts and Humanities Award; and three “Meet the Composer” grants. She was a member of the New Mexico Composers Guild and a founder of the New Mexico Women Composers Guild in 1985. She was also arts editor of The Taos News; for two years a weekly columnist for the Sangre de Cristo Chronicle; and wrote for many arts magazine in New Mexico and elsewhere.

Forman was born in Chicago in 1934 and grew up in Grenada, Mississippi. She lived and worked in New Orleans, Nashville, parts of California and Maine before settling down in northern New Mexico. Starting piano lessons at age seven, she decided to become a composer at sixteen. Later, she was one of six selected from a field of 200 to work with the Pulitzer-Prize winning composer Dr. Robert Ward at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida, with whom she worked briefly. She was largely self-taught.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Forman helped establish a number of theater programs in California. She co-founded the San Francisco Marionette Theater and founded a children’s theater, Comedia Repertory in Menlo Park. In 1961, she founded and directed the Apple House Gallery in Three Rivers, California, a theater that also offered children’s performing arts workshops.

Forman was an active socialist and anti-capitalist. For a short period beginning in the late 1960s, she was married to Marion Myron Syrek, a member of the Spartacist League, a Trotskyist political grouping. Forman was also a member. In 1965, she took a budding interest in puppetry into this political context and soon after began creating Punch and Judy shows in which the characters discussed issues such as draft resistance, migrant labor, welfare and more . In 1966, she formed “The Migrant Theater,” a non-profit, bilingual repertory theater that used puppets to bring social issues into educational venues. Forman scripted plays and performed with The Migrant Theater until the late 1970s. Forman remained a socialist and anti-capitalist throughout her life and her creative works many times reflect her philosophies.

During the early 1970s, she was playwright for the Mime Experiment, Inc. of Albuquerque, New Mexico, a repertory group that combined puppetry, pantomime, and music to present plays in open air settings. Throughout her life, Forman performed hundreds of puppet shows all over the United States and Asia, and conducted many workshops and courses. She was a specialist in the use of puppetry in multicultural and bilingual education.

In 1977 she was hired to work full-time as playwright-in-residence for the Children’s Theatre of Maine. While in Maine, Forman founded the Downeast Chamber Opera (DCO), a local group in Biddeford. After moving to Taos, New Mexico in 1978, she also founded the Southwest Chamber Opera (SWCO). Both DCO and SWCO emphasized operas by women and to provide conducting opportunities for women. Forman’s operas Polly Baker, The Blind Men, and Ikarus were performed under the auspices of DCO and SWCO. The performance of Ikarus was offered as a joint production with composer Kay Gardner's opera Ladies' Voices in 1981.

Combining a love of science fiction with musical composition, Forman forged collaborations with well-known science fiction authors. She worked with Anne McCaffrey on a musical adaptation of portions of McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern saga. Forman’s Dragonsongs music was released on cassette by the Performing Arts Press in the mid-1980s. Forman also created a ballet, The Soul Painter and the Shapeshifter, based on a story of the same name by science fiction author Robert Silverberg. The work was performed in Huntsville, Alabama in 1991.

With a grant from the Jane Austen Society of North America, Forman adapted Jane Austen's Lady Susan into a one-act opera and later adapted The Beautifull Cassandra from Austen's juvenilia to music. Forman wrote a full-length musical, Jonah!, which she produced, cast and publicized herself for a 1988 staging in Taos. She employed her memory of historical events to create Pikadon (1985), a radio program about the 1945 atomic bombing of Japan that was broadcast on 22 stations across the U.S. in August 1985, and The Sweater (2007), a music drama set during the Holocaust. Additionally, Forman wrote hundreds of other pieces from children's musicals to orchestrals to shorter impromptus and sonatinas. In the 2000s, Forman became Resident Composer for Soundscapes, a Taos-based chamber music group, and for the Taos Jewish Center.