Since completing her studies at the Royal Academy of Music, Panufnik has written a wide range of pieces for opera, ballet, music theatre, choral works, chamber compositions and music for film and television which are regularly performed worldwide. Panufnik’s highly distinctive compositional voice is reflected in the wide range of high profile commissions and performances that mark her career to date, both in the UK and internationally. She is perhaps best known for the large-scale choral work of 1998; the perennially popular Westminster Mass, commissioned for Westminster Cathedral Choir on the occasion of Cardinal Basil Hume's 75th birthday. A subsequent recording of the Mass received great critical acclaim: "tonal, expressive, keenly spiced with chromatic harmony, and finding room within a seven-movement English-language Mass setting for such haunting ideas as the harp's flowing accompaniment to the Gloria, while elsewhere strings and bells surround the voices like a halo."(Malcolm Hayes, Classic FM Magazine, October 1999.)

The 2008/09 season sees no less than 18 premieres in nine different countries. Recent commissions include Tibetan Winter, Indian Summer for Tasmin Little and the Orchestra of the Swan, choral works for The Sixteen and King's College Cambridge, a critically acclaimed harp concerto Powers & Dominions, Letters from Burma for oboist Douglas Boyd and the Vellinger String Quartet, Leda, a ballet for English National Ballet and Bratislavia Cantans, and Abraham - a violin concerto commissioned by Savannah Music Christian, Islamic and Jewish music. A concert in Winter 2008 in Jerusalem saw the world premiere of a new adaptation of Abraham, entitled Three Paths to Peace, by the World Orchestra for Peace under Valery Gergiev. Premieres in 2009 include 'The Audience', which sets texts by Wendy Cope to music for string quartet, featuring the poet as narrator. 'The Audience' received its premiere at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival and continues to tour. The Wayflete Singers and the London Mozart Players collaborated in a new choral work entitled 'Spring', which premiered at Winchester Cathedral in March. The Exultate Singers will perform a new choral work in Autumn 2009, and future plans for 2010 include further new works for choir.

Recordings include works on the Warner Classics and EMI Classics labels. A choral disc, ‘Angels Sing’, feature Douai Missa Brevis, Prayer, Spring, The Christmas Life, Angels Sing and Westminster Mass, sung by the Joyful Company of Singers. Settings for solo voices and orchestra of Vikram Seth's Beastly Tales was recorded by Patricia Rozario and City of London Sinfonia,and The Upside Down Sailor for narrator and ensemble is available on the Black Box label.