Judy Dunaway was born in Mississippi in 1964 and holds a Ph.D. in musical composition from the State University of New York at Stony Brook; before that, she studied at Wesleyan University, among others with Alvin Lucier. Since 1990, she has played a large number of concerts with her Balloon Ensemble and created numerous works of different kinds; at the same time she is engaged in many social projects. In 2006, she co-founded S.W.I.R.L. (Sex Workers’ Internet Radio Library), a non-profi t educational website for audio arts.