Yolanda completed a Bachelor of Music (Hons.) and Master of Music (Hons.) at the University of Melbourne, prior to moving to Madrid, Spain, where she worked at the Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales (ICCMU), ascribed to the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, for many years. There, she completed a Master’s degree in Arts Administration and published widely on twentieth-century music and dance. She also became an experienced Spanish-English translator.

In 2015, she returned to Australia, completing her PhD at ANU with a thesis titled “Making Music in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939)”. In 2021 she was appointed a Visiting Fellow at the Research School of Humanities and the Arts, ANU, for a two-year term. She subsequently worked in Research and Academic Support at the University of Melbourne, translating the kNOwVAWdata course into Spanish, and joined the FAST team at Monash. After a series of deployments, she became Senior Administrative Officer at the Centre for Development Economics and Sustainability (CDES) at the Faculty of Business and Economics.