Her research explores the intersection of artificial intelligence and computational linguistics with music. She completed her PhD at Yale University, where the subject of her work was an automated composition system called Kulitta. Donya is also the active maintainer of the Euterpea library for music representation in Haskell and is part of the MUSICA project, which is part of the DAPRA Communicating with Computers program and focuses on development of interactive systems in the musical domain.