Irma Commanday attended New College, Columbia University. During World War II she was Louis Untermeyer’s assistant at the Council for Books in War Time, selecting forty books a month to reprint in paperback form for members of the Armed Services. She was administrative director at Indian Hill, a summer workshop in the arts in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, established by Mordecai and Irma Commanday Bauman in 1952 and donated to Brooklyn College in 1976. In 1978 Commanday joined dancer Marjorie Guthrie as her associate at the Committee to Combat Huntington’s Disease and as coordinator of the Woody Guthrie Archive. With her husband Mordecai, Irma Commanday produced The Stations of Bach, a biography of Johann Sebastian Bach, for PBS, first shown nationally on Public Television Stations in May 1990, and on Bach anniversaries since.