Born in Australia and raised in an immigrant family, Melissa Dunphy herself immigrated to the United States in 2003 and has since become an acclaimed composer specializing in vocal, political, and theatrical music. She first came to national attention in 2009 when her large-scale work, The Gonzales Cantata, was featured in venues such as The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, where host Rachel Maddow called it “the coolest thing you’ve ever seen on this show.” Other notable works include Totality, commissioned by The King’s Singers and VOCES8, the song cycle Tesla’s Pigeon, which won first place in the NATS Art Song Composition Award, and What Do You Think I Fought for at Omaha Beach? which won the Simon Carrington Chamber Singers Competition.

In 2024, Dunphy was awarded an Independence Foundation Fellowship in the Arts. She received an Opera America Discovery Grant for Alice Tierney, a commission for Oberlin Opera Theater that premiered in 2023 and received its professional debut at Opera Columbus. She has been composer-in-residence for the Immaculata Symphony Orchestra, Volti, and the Saint Louis Chamber Chorus, and her commissions include works for the BBC Singers, VOCES8, Experiments in Opera, and the Kennett Symphony, among others. Dunphy is also a Barrymore Award-nominated theater composer and sound designer, serving from 2014-2024 as Director of Music Composition for the National Puppetry Conference at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Connecticut.

Dunphy has a Ph.D. in composition from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.M. from West Chester University and is on faculty at Rutgers University. She is president of the boards of directors for Wildflower Composers and Lyric Fest. She and her husband, Matt, are also avid citizen archaeologists and co-hosts of the popular podcast The Boghouse about their adventures in Philadelphia colonial archaeology.