Moya Clare Dyring was born in Coburg, Victoria in 1909, the third child of Carl Peter Wilhelm Dyring, medical practitioner, and his second wife Dagmar Alexandra Esther, née Cohn, both Victorian born.

Moya was educated (1917–1927) at Firbank Church of England Girls' Grammar School, Brighton.

[2] After visiting Paris in 1928, she studied at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School (NGV), Melbourne, from 1929 to 1932,[2] where she met her future husband Sam Atyeo an artist who was a Parisian resident.

After NGV, Moya studied under George Bell in the Bourke Street Studio School in Melbourne.

[3] For several months in 1937 Dyring took charge of Heide, the home and garden of the art patrons John and Sunday Reed, at Bulleen, a suburb of Melbourne.

Atyeo later accepted a commission in Dominica, West Indies, and left Dyring in Vence.

At the outbreak of war she was evacuated back to Australia via South Africa, where she painted and tried to study tribal art.

In her later years, unable to travel freely, she painted children against the backdrop of Paris.

[5] The Heide Museum of Modern Art holds many paintings and drawings, some acquired through the John and Sydney Reed collection.