Molissa Fenley founded Molissa Fenley and Company in 1977 and has since created over 90 dance works during her continuing career. She grew up in Ibadan, Nigeria traveling there with her family in 1961, completing all of her early education there in International Schools and her last two years of high school in Spain. She returned to the US in 1971 to study dance at Mills College in Oakland, California. Upon graduation in 1975, she moved to New York. With her company, Molissa Fenley and Company, and as a soloist working in collaboration with visual artists and composers, she has performed throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America, Europe, Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Her work has been commissioned by the American Dance Festival, the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival, the Dia Art Foundation, Jacob's Pillow, the Joyce Theater, Lincoln Center, the New National Theater of Tokyo, The National Institute of Performing Arts in Seoul, The Kitchen, and Dance Theater Workshop/New York Live Arts. Both Cenotaph and State of Darkness were awarded a Bessie for Choreography in 1985 and 1988 respectively. State of Darkness was awarded Outstanding Revival in 2021.

Molissa has also set many works on ballet and contemporary dance companies, most recently for  Southern Methodist University (Rhythm Field), the Oakland Ballet (Redwood Park), Pacific Northwest Ballet, (State of Darkness), Repertory Dance Theatre (Desert Sea; Energizer), Barnard/Columbia (Amdo), Robert Moses' Kin (The Vessel Stories), the Seattle Dance Project, (Planes in Air), Ohio Ballet, (Feral), Deutsche Oper Berlin, (The Bridge of Dreams), the Australian Dance Theater (A Descent into the Maelstrom).  She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of The American Academy in Rome and has enjoyed residencies at Yaddo, the Marble House Project, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Baryshnikov Art Center, Djerassi, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Harvard, Hotchkiss School, Dance HUB in Santa Barbara, Dance Hub in Firenze and Agropoli, Italy and is a twice recipient of awards from the Asian Cultural Council to visit Japan. 

Molissa is Professor Emerita of Dance, Mills College (1999-2020) and often teaches choreographic and repertory workshops at other universities, most recently at Bennington, Barnard/Columbia, Hunter, and Southern Methodist University.   Rhythm Field: The Dance of Molissa Fenley was published by Seagull Press/University of Chicago in 2015.