The New Yorker describes it as “New York’s plucky Upper West Side new-music series.” As of October 2014, Lyons has programmed music by over 160 composers on over fifty concerts. She has commissioned and performed premières of works by numerous living composers, including Kathryn Alexander, Juhi Bansal, Hayes Biggs, Robert Carl, Chen S’iang, Jesse D’Aiello, Stephen Dembski, Jed Distler, Kaeza Fearn, Daniel Felsenfeld, Daniel Gilliam, Daron Hagen, Wang Jie, Paula Kimper, Wendy Wan’ki Lee, Katarina Leyman, Eli Marshall, Jorge Martin, Daphna Mor, Frank Oteri, Glen Roven, David Rakowski, Jessica Rudman, She Ye, Faye-Ellen Silverman, Daniel Sonenberg, Dennis Tobenski, Craig Urquhart, Barbara White, Beth Wiemann, Peter Winkler, Randall Woolf, and Zhou Xu. Lyons served as Assistant Executive Director of the New York New Music Ensemble (2006-2008) and Executive Director of the Lotte Lehmann Foundation (2008-2011). She has served as Adjunct Assistant Professor at Bronx Community College (2006-2012), as a Special Projects Instructor for Empire State College (2006-2008), and as a member of the composition faculty of the Seasons Music Festival Academy (2009-2012), Since 2013 she has served as a Senior Artist Teacher with her own composition studio on the faculty of The Hartt School. In 2014 she joined the composition faculty of the Wintergreen Summer Music Festival and Academy. Lyons has received commissions from, among others, the ASCAP Foundation / Charles Kingsford Fund, American Opera Projects, Amy Pivar Dances, the Beijing New Music Ensemble, ComposersCollaborative Inc., Fort Greene Park Conservancy, Paul Sperry, Two Sides Sounding, Adrienne Dandrich, Thomas Bagwell, the Finisterra Trio, Entelechron Trio, Kyo-Shin-An Arts, the 5 Borough Music Festival, the AIDS Quilt Songbook at Twenty, Mirror Visions, IonSound, Sweet Plantain String Quartet, and The Walt Whitman Project. Lyons often turns to unusual sources for texts, and combines ritualistic chant and expanded vocal techniques. Tom Strini in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel described “Nahuatl Hymn to the Earth Mother” for treble choir as “hair-raising, yet elegant, [with] slides, dips, yips and yelps amid ceremonial intensity."