After completing high school, she entered the University of São Paulo to study physics but almost immediately moved to Paris, where she graduated in pure mathematics in 1967 at the Paris-Saclay Faculty of Sciences.

"[1] Returning to Brazil, she obtained a doctorate in social anthropology at the University of Campinas, defending in 1976 the thesis The dead and the others: an analysis of the funerary system and the notion of person among the Krahó Indians.

[2][4][5] In 1975, she went with her first husband, Marianno Carneiro da Cunha, on a trip to Nigeria, in which she investigated the question of the return to Africa of slaves freed in Brazil.

She played an important role for the Brazilian Constituent Assembly (1988) in the elaboration of Articles 231 and 232 of the Federal Constitution, which guarantee the rights of indigenous peoples.

[2][4][5] Cunha has been a prolific publisher of books and papers in her technical area, covering the ethnology, history and rights of Brazilian Indians, African slavery in Brazil, ethnicity, traditional knowledge and anthropological theory.