His mother, Johanna Lustig, was a pianist from Vienna, Austria and his father, Eugene Borisovich Dunkel, was a scenic designer, born in Russia.
He studied flute with Robert DiDomenica and William Kincaid, and piano with Lothar Epstein and Anka Bernstein-Landau.
In 1978, he co-founded and picked the players for Dennis Russell Davies's American Composers Orchestra.
[1] As music director of the Westchester Philharmonic, Dunkel developed a reputation for presenting new works and promoting new artists.
[1] Dunkel and the orchestra were the recipients of the 2000 Leonard Bernstein Award for Educational Programming from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) and the American Symphony Orchestra League for excellence and innovation in music education.