Michal was born to Tzipi and Dr. Menachem Finkelstein. Michal is married to Yuval Feldman, a law professor at Bar-Ilan University, and they have five children. Upon graduating high school, Michal served in the intelligence unit. In 1999, she received her BSc in computer science from Bar Ilan University summa cum laude. In 2005, she completed her PhD studies in the University of California, Berkeley.[2] In her PhD thesis, she studied incentives for collaboration in peer-to-peer systems. Her PhD dissertations included several advances in the area of cooperation in peer-to-peer systems.[3] Upon graduation, Feldman returned to Israel and continued her postdoctoral studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, under the supervision of Prof. Noam Nisan.
In 2007, she joined as a faculty member to the Jerusalem School of Business Administration, and as a member of the Center for the Study of Rationality. From 2011 to 2013, Feldman was a visiting professor at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a visiting researcher in Microsoft Research New England. In 2011, Feldman was elected to the Global Young Academy, and in 2012, she was elected to the Israel Young Academy, established by the National Academy of Sciences and Humanities. In 2013, upon her return to Israel, Feldman joined the School of Computer Science at Tel Aviv University.