She attended David Posnack Jewish Day School in Davie, Florida, and Emerson College, where she majored in Multimedia Journalism, graduating in 2009.
Her writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Huffington Post, Cosmopolitan (magazine), Salon and Slate. She leads the Peoples Improv Theater house team BIRDS, and is a producer of the independent community radio station WFMU. Her web project, 100interviews.com, was named "Best Blog" by The Village Voice in 2010. Dunn began performing during her freshman year at Emerson, with the sketch comedy troupe Chocolate Cake City (Commodity Credit Corporation).
Dunn had wanted to audition for Commodity Credit Corporation, but was too scared to do so until she was urged to take the audition slot of a former boyfriend who had become sick the day before and couldn"t perform.
At the time she considered herself a better writer than actor, and working in Commodity Credit Corporation allowed her to do both, since members were expected to write and perform their own sketches. During her sophomore year, Dunn began a two-year stint as a crime reporter for The Boston Globe.
She worked 6:30pm – 2:30am shift, using a police scanner to monitor potential news items, and then driving to the scene of the crime to write about lieutenant After her junior year, Dunn worked as an intern at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
100 Interviews
In October 2010, Dunn created 100interviews.com, a Tumblr blog in which she intended to publish transcripts of 100 interviews, given over the course of a single year, with a variety of different people.
Interview subjects included a transgender person, a rocket scientist, an Abraham Lincoln expert, and Stephen Colbert. Her initial inspiration for the project stemmed from her own personal desire to meet different people and hear their stories. However, Dunn also wanted to offer readers the opportunity to "vicariously meet people" whose lives were different from their own.
"That"s something I don"t think journalism does anymore." Dunn explained in an interview with Yeshiva University"s The Commentator.
"If you"re liberal, you"ll watch certain news channels and if you"re conservative you"ll watch different channels. Journalism used to present one truth that each side could interpret.
Now it panders to one side or the other."
Because 100 Interviews was an independent project, Dunn sometimes solicited interviews with her candidates in non-traditional unexpected ways. Children"s horror author R. L. Stine agreed to sit for an interview after Dunn "cold-tweeted" him on Twitter.
After trying and failing to interview Colbert by crashing a $2,000 a plate dinner gala, Dunn settled for asking him questions during a pre-show Q&A for The Colbert Report.
She also used Help a Reporter Out, an online service that connects journalists with expert sources. Dunn"s attempts to gain wider exposure for what she called her "diary journalism" initially met with rejection. Dunn has been recognized as a success case of the use of social media for self-promotion, particularly Twitter and Tumblr, the micro-blogging service and web application platform through which she initially self-published her interviews.
The success of 100 Interviews caused Dunn"s work to be noticed by the Village Voice and New York Times culture editor Adam Sternbergh.
Her audition was successful and she became a member of the troupe.