Maya Dunietz was born in Tel Aviv on April 16, 1981 and started piano at five with Jenina Lobenberg, adding flute with Moshe Epstein and theory and solfège with Lev Kogan. At ten she began composition study with Keren Rosenbaum, whose Reflex Ensemble gave her a first working relationship with experimental sound. Her piano teachers between 1993 and 2006 included Naomi Lev, Daniel Gortler, Yaron Godfried, Ofer Bryer, Alexander Volkov and Amit Golan, whose memory she would later attach to her first trio record. She graduated in 1998 from the Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts in Givatayim, where her major was jazz piano, and by then had already worked with the Jerusalem Salsa Band, the Avram Felder Big Band and the Bat Kol Choir. At sixteen she travelled to Côte d'Ivoire as Israel's young representative to a Jeunesses Musicales convention and met the Zimbabwean mbira player and singer Chiwoniso Maraire, a friend and collaborator until Maraire's death in 2013.

In 1999 Dunietz enrolled at The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York, where she played with Ikue Mori, Mary Halvorson, Shahzad Ismaily, Zeena Parkins, Aaron Dugan, Daniel Zamir and John Zorn. Between 2000 and 2003 she toured Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe and Scandinavia with Malika Makouf Rasmussen's Women's Voice project, an itinerary that introduced her to the Sami practice of joik, a way of evoking a thing through the voice rather than singing about it, which she has cited as a lasting influence on her own vocal writing. Back in Israel she directed the Givol Choir, and her score for the theatre piece Garinim, directed by Ariel Efraim Ashbel, took best music at the 2003 Acco Festival of Alternative Israeli Theatre. In 2005 she went to the Royal Conservatory of The Hague to study composition with Gilius van Bergeijk and began working with the studio's analogue synthesiser walls.

The decisive turn came in 2004, when she approached the veteran Tel Aviv clarinetist Harold Rubin and started a free-improvisation duo that ran until his death in 2020. Their home room was Hagada Hasmalit (The Left Bank) in Tel Aviv, where the pair played hundreds of concerts with visiting and local improvisers, and the duo also appeared at the FMP Total Music Meeting in Berlin. The partnership produced A Mono Musical Suite For Three Manic Musicians in 2005, a ten-part trio improvisation with Rubin on clarinet, Yoni Silver on bass clarinet and Dunietz at the piano. Her second free-improvisation record went out under joint billing: Cousin It, cut at Eastcote Studios in London in 2008 with the bassist John Edwards and the drummer Steve Noble, two central figures of British free improvisation, and issued in 2011 by Hopscotch Records, the label run by Assif Tsahar, who also mastered it in Tel Aviv. She has since improvised with Evan Parker, Eddie Prévost, John Tilbury, Mark Sanders, John Butcher, Okkyung Lee, Oren Ambarchi, Alvin Curran, Fritz Welch, Jean-Claude Jones and Roscoe Mitchell, the last of these inside her installation of seventeen pianos at the Bemis Center in Omaha.

Alongside the improvising she has kept two other working lives going. From 2000 she was a band member or guest in a run of Israeli groups: she played piano, Fender Rhodes and Hammond organ across the debut album by the Tel Aviv art-rock band Habiluim in 2003 and stayed with them until they broke up in 2014, guested on accordion and keyboards for Boom Pam's Puerto Rican Nights in 2008, and turned up with Midnight Peacocks, Eatliz, Malox, Oy Division, Rona Keinan and the French band Cheveu. From 2010 she has been a regular in the Hyperion Ensemble of the Romanian composers Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria Avram, playing piano and flute on at least seven Edition Modern releases recorded in Tel Aviv, Bucharest, London, Paris, Berlin and Kraków, several of them conducted by Ilan Volkov; Dumitrescu and Avram commissioned two pieces from her, Olive Tree (premiered at the George Enescu Festival in Bucharest in 2011) and God Ink (2012). She sang on Alastor (Book Of Angels Volume 21), the Eyvind Kang realisation of John Zorn's second Masada book issued by Tzadik in April 2014, and Ensemble Modern's horn player Saar Berger commissioned and recorded her Figaro's Dream. Dieter Schnebel wrote his song cycle Liebe-Leid for her in 2013.

Her longest single project is the recovery of the music of the Ethiopian nun and pianist Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru. In 2013 Dunietz initiated and directed a tribute to Emahoy for the Jerusalem Season of Culture, transcribing the composer's personal notation into playable scores and producing the first published sheet-music edition of her piano pieces, then performing the repertoire at Counterflows in Glasgow, Café Oto in London, Tectonics in Oslo, Clandestino in Sweden, Le Guess Who? in the Netherlands, The Wulf in Los Angeles and La Gaîté Lyrique in Paris. The project reached record in 2024, when a Dunietz arrangement for piano and nine strings was performed at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris on April 12 and 13 and taped for the French label Latency. Her installation work runs in parallel and is largely built out of pianos: Thicket entered the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou, and she has had solo exhibitions at the Pompidou (2018), Frac Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur in Marseille (2018), CCA Tel Aviv (2015), The Artists Residence in Herzliya (2021) and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha (2022). Five Chilling Mammoths, five retired pianos fitted with transducers and driven by an algorithm derived from irrational numbers, was made with the sound designer Daniel Meir and released as a recording by Café Oto's Takuroku label, and her score for the documentary That Orchestra With the Broken Instruments won best original score at the 2021 Israeli Documentary Film Awards. She led a three-day residency at Café Oto in July 2019 and performed her choral and ensemble piece Hai Shirim with the Meitar Ensemble and the Mädchenchor am Essener Dom at the Moers Festival on June 4, 2022.

The most straightforwardly jazz-shaped records of her career are the most recent ones. In 2021 she took a piano trio into the studio for a day and a half with the bassist Barak Mori and the drummer Amir Bresler, sketching minimal heads and simple grooves and leaving the rest open. Free The Dolphin came out on the Tel Aviv label Raw Tapes on May 7, 2021, with a reading of "Lover Man" among the originals, a guest verse from Avishai Cohen's trumpet, and a dedication to Amit Golan and Chiwoniso Maraire. The same trio made Thank You Tree two years later, released August 25, 2023, this time opening three tracks out to a seven-piece horn and percussion section drawn from the city's jazz players. Both were produced by Rejoicer. A further collaborative album with Berlin's Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop, The Sound of Difference and Connection, followed on ORTHODOX Records.

Dunietz is a pianist of extremes who moves between idioms without softening any of them: the Raw Tapes trio records sit on stride and blues foundations, over folk-lullaby melodies and African scales and rhythms, and then break open into out-of-scale outbursts that come straight from the free-improvisation practice she has kept up since 2004. Raw Tapes' own copy for Free The Dolphin reaches for Erroll Garner and Ahmad Jamal as reference points, and the comparison holds for the touch rather than the repertoire. Her sixteen years opposite Harold Rubin taught her the discipline he called playing "Neanderthal," arriving without vocabulary and building from nothing, and it shows in the way her improvised sets refuse a fixed harmonic centre while staying legible as piano playing rather than as texture. The other constant is her interest in pitch outside equal temperament, reached from three directions at once: the Sami joik she encountered on tour in Scandinavia, the micro-tonality and natural harmonics she writes into her scores for choir and ensemble, and the detuned, transducer-driven pianos of her installations, which she describes as freed from equal temperament's regime. The improvised-music press has treated her as a serious interpreter as well as an improviser, largely on the strength of her Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru transcriptions, which turned a private notation system into a performable repertoire and put a body of Ethiopian piano music into international circulation.