Anne Boyd was born in Sydney to James Boyd and Annie Freda Deason Boyd (née Osborn). Her father died when she was age 3, and her mother sent her to live with relatives on a sheep station (Maneroo) near Longreach, in central Queensland. She moved to Canberra aged 11, and although she was pleased to be reunited with her mother, she missed the beauty of the outback terrain.
Boyd studied music at the University of Sydney, where she was one of Peter Sculthorpe"s first students.
This intimate experience with the Australian landscape – its expansiveness, its dramatic changes, and its "indescribable energy" – had a profound influence on her future as a composer. She began composing while still at Maneroo, at the age of eight, for the resources she had available: recorder and voice. In New South Wales, she received her education at Albury High School and Hornsby Girls" High School.
Sculthorpe had a profound influence on her.
She said that his music was the first time she had heard music which expressed her experience of the Australian landscape. In the early 1970s she and Sculthorpe were engaged to be married, but they broke the engagement as they believed one composer in a household was enough.
After receiving her Bachelor of Arts (Honours) degree, she received a Doctor of Philosophy in composition from the University of York in England. In 1990, Boyd became the first Australian and the first woman to be appointed to the Chair of at the University of Sydney.
Before that Boyd was the foundation head of the Department of at the University of Hong Kong (1981-1990) and taught at the University of Sussex (1972-1977).
She is currently Pro Dean (Academic) of the Sydney Conservatorium of at the University of Sydney. In 1996 she was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia for her contributions to music as a composer and as an educator. Boyd"s struggle to maintain funding for music courses in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Sydney was featured in the documentary Facing the (2001).
The Department of was incorporated into the Sydney Conservatorium at the same university from the start of 2005.
