Born in France the son of Alexander Schmemann and Juliana Ossorguine (a descendant of Juliana of Lazarevo), he moved to the United States as a child, in 1951. He grew up speaking Russian at home, but he visited his ancestral homeland for the first time only in 1980 when he arrived with his family as Moscow correspondent for The Associated Press. It was not until 1990 that the Soviet authorities allowed him to visit his grandparents' home village near Kaluga. His reflections on the changing fate of the village made up his 1997 memoirs Echoes of a Native Land: Two Centuries of a Russian Village.

Writing for The New York Times, he won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1991 for his coverage of the reunification of Germany. The September 12, 2001 New York Times featured a front-page article written by Schmemann about the 9/11 attacks. He won an Emmy Award (Outstanding Individual Achievement in a Craft: Writing) in 2003 for the Discovery Channel documentary Mortal Enemies.

Schmemann has three children and lives in Paris.