William Kinderman was born in 1952 in Philadelphia, USA. Following undergraduate work at Dickinson College, he studied philosophy at the University of Vienna and music at Yale and the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his PhD in 1980. The most notable of his piano teachers was Dieter Weber at the Hochschule für Musik in Vienna. Kinderman has received awards from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. During 1986/7 he was in residence at the Beethoven-Haus, Bonn. He is currently Professor of Music at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and has also taught at the University of Victoria and at the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin.

Alfred Brendel has described Kinderman as 'a very rare bird' on account of his ability to combine performance and scholarship. To German critic Gerd Kowa, Kinderman is 'a herald of Beethoven research and interpretation—a sovereign artist'. Edward Rothstein, commenting on the Beethoven Workshop which Kinderman held with Alfred Brendel at Carnegie Hall in 1993, wrote in The New York Times of his 'impressive bursts of intellectual energy and distinctive insight'. Kinderman has given numerous piano and lecture recitals in Canada, the USA and Europe, and is also known for his writings on music, including four books on Beethoven: Beethoven's 'Diabelli' Variations (1987), ed., Beethoven's Compositional Process (1991), the comprehensive monograph Beethoven (1995), and the three-volume study Artaria 195: Beethoven's Sketchbook for the Missa solemnis and the Piano Sonata in E Major, Opus 109.