Eliza Schneider

Schneider spent her formative years on a Chippewa reservation in Bemidji, Minnesota with her two older brothers in a mostly Jewish family. She moved to New York at the age of 8. Her father became a math and drama teacher at the School of Arts High School in Rochester, New York, where she graduated as salutatorian. Her mother was an attorney for the reservation. She started playing violin, which she learned from her grandfather, learning the Suzuki method, after seeing L Shenkar. When she was sixteen, she was in her first musical group, IT'S MY PARTY! From ages 7–20, she went to Jewish summer camp, becoming a counselor, and started performing on stage. By the time she was in the fourth grade she began writing and performing her own plays, because the teacher told her that she would only be allowed to stage a play if she "wrote, produced, directed." Four years later she was chosen for a part in Annie; Schneider's parents would not let her tour with the troupe after being cast. She participated in a theater program at Northwestern University's National High School Institute and graduated from UCLA in 1994 as a world arts and cultures major.

While in college she continued going to auditions and got the role of Sheila Brentwood in the television series The Amazing Live Sea Monkeys. For the show she was allowed to cast the actors who played her parents. After the show got canceled, she replaced Alanna Ubach as the assistant and co-host for the second and third seasons of Beakman's World.