She grew up in Slovakia - her father was Slovak Hungarian, her mother Czech - hence her Hungarian name and strong musical leanings towards that culture. She studied in Bratislava, Brno (at the Janáček Academy) and Prague (Music Academy), in Siena (with Franco Donatoni at the Academia Chigiana) and in Amsterdam (with Ton de Leeuw). She is one of the most frequently performed personalities of the current musical scene. As one of the Quattro group of composers, formed in 1996 with Luboš Fišer, Otmar Mácha and Zdeněk Lukáš (they all have since died), she is one of the most frequently performed Czech composers. In the 1990s she taught in the USA (Cincinnati, Ohio) and has since been visiting there regularly every year.
Bodorová's music has been making its mark since the 1980s: apart from performances of her chamber music, three concertos stood at the start of her career - Planctus for viola and orchestra, Pontem video - a concerto for organ and strings, and Tre canzoni da suonare for guitar and strings. Her music has been heard in all continents - in 1996 her Hommage to Columbus was even played by Lubomír Brabec in the Antarctic.

Her Concerto dei fiori for violin and strings had its premiere at the Prague Spring Festival of 1997, her orchestral suite Saturnalia was first performed in 1999 at Bochum in Germany. Terezin Ghetto Requiem for Baritone and String Quartet was performed at Warwick and Leamington Festival in July 1998, Wigmore Hall in London in October 1998, again in Warwick in July 1999, other festivals in UK, in Berlin 8.XI. 1999, in Halle, Theresienstadt, at the Prague Spring Festival 2000, Coventry and Huddersfield /UK, November 2000/.

Her fourth string quartet, completed in 2000 and entitled Shofarot, is frequently performed both at home (as part of the chamber music season of the Czech Philharmonic) and abroad. In 2001 Sylvie Bodorová wrote her piano trio Megiddo, inspired by her study visit in Israel, and it was first performed as part of the week of Czech music at Leamington in May 2001. The Prague Symphony Orchestra FOK selected her (together with three other Czech composers, Karel Husa, Petr Eben and Jan Klusák) for its 2000/2001 "Czech Composers at the Turn of the Millennium" series.

Bodorová's latest large-scale composition and a signal success has been her oratorio Juda Maccabeus commissioned by the Prague Spring International Festival, performed at the St Vitus Cathedral in Prague in May 2002 and subsequently broadcast by Czech TV. In 2003 Bodorova wrote her concerto Mysterium druidum for the harpist Kateřina Englichová and the Tucson Festival in the USA. For the following seasons, 2004 to 2007, she is working on several new commissions, among them one for the Czech Chamber Music Society, another for the pianist Martin Kasík and the Prague Philharmonia, and yet another - Vertumnus for brass quintet - for the Warwick Festival's 2004 Czech season.