Maria Ljungdahl lives in a village by the coast, in the archipelago region outside Stockholm, Sweden. Her first compositions were written in 1964. She has never stopped thinking about her own musical ideas and how to develop them, but school and other interesting or necessary things in life got in the way of a possible career in music. Composition teachers and mentors through the years have been, among others, Greta Westfelt, Gunnar Borén, Ladislau Müller, Monica Hansson, Carl-Axel Hall, Per-Anders Nilsson, Michael W. Morse, Patrick Ross-Ross, Mattias Lundberg and Magnus Holmlund. Beginning in 1995, she has studied musicology, music theory, music history, aesthetics, ethnomusicology, philosophy, music technology and composition at the universities in Gothenburg, Lund, Uppsala and Stockholm. She is, since 2005, author of a blog on the internet, called Beyond Good and Atonal.