After graduating from Cornell University she married and relocated with her husband to Europe where for much of the time she lived - apart from three years in Australia and Japan - between 1956 and 1982, while remaining fully networked with academic peers in the United States.
The MA dissertation was titled "Progressive Tendencies in French Manuscript Illuminations (1515-1530)" and the doctoral work concerned "Godefroy le Batave and the 1520s Hours Workshop".
[5] In 1956 the Orths moved to Europe where they lived briefly in France and then Germany before returning to Brooklyn where Myra enrolled at New York University and embarked on her postgraduate studies.
[5] Myra Orth returned to the United States in 1982 and took a teaching position at the University of Virginia, where she taught renaissance art history for a year, later moving across to California.
Context for the appointment is provided by the Getty Center's extensive document photographing project, and for two years during her time with the organisation Orth found herself serving as "Acting Head of the Photo Archive" She took the lead in a major exercise to photograph and place on microfilm manuscripts held at the Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Saint Petersburg and on Prague's National Museum and Museum of Decorative Arts, a project undertaken jointly with the Paris-based Institut de recherche et d'histoire des textes.
Another highlight of her career with the Getty Center involved curating an exhibition on the newly acquired (and remarkably extensive) archive of the English art historian Ellis Waterhouse.