M. Mara-Ann is a San Francisco, California based American writer, vocalist, and media artist, as well as the artistic director of Flying Deer Theater, and publisher of WOOD press.

Born to a family of nature enthusiasts, M. Mara-Ann spent much of her young life growing up on the back of a horse in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. Summers and weekends were spent exploring remote wilderness areas on horseback, camping in alpine meadows, and learning to navigate backcountry trails, all of which fostered a strong affinity and abiding love for the natural world. Living in a large urban city during the school year, Mara played flute in the school band, devised elaborate science fair projects, and ran cross-country with her journalism teacher. Once at college, she set out as a chemistry major headed to med school, but accidentally fell in love with writing and critical discourse, became fluent in a second language while studying abroad in Sweden, and graduated with a literature degree grounded in the natural sciences. This cross-disciplinary approach to the arts and sciences combined with her upbringing among wild and natural spaces set the stage for Mara’s work in writing, multi-media, and the environment.

Mara received her BA in English Literature (with cross-disciplinary work in Natural Sciences) from CU Boulder, including a year abroad at Linköping University studying Swedish language and culture. After graduating college in the early 1990’s, she drove cross country to San Francisco to join the innovative west coast arts, culture, and technology scene where she has lived ever since. Mara began graduate school in the late 90’s at New College of California in the Writing and Poetics program studying with Lyn Hejinian, Kathleen Fraser, Linda Vorris, and David Meltzer. She also participated in several independent workshops during this time with important writers such as Diane DiPrima and Carla Harryman. Mara received her MFA in English Literature and Creative Writing (with cross-disciplinary work in music and live media performance) from Mills College in the mid 2000's studying with Juliana Spahr, Stephen Ratcliffe, Fred Frith, Molly Holm, Maggi Payne, Katherine Mezur, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Walter K. Lew, and Pauline Oliveros.

Mara's creative work is inspired and infused by the wild beauty and constantly evolving arts and culture of the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as her fine-arts work in multi-media storytelling and extended multi-platform publishing, and her commercial work in the interactive media sector as a creative director, production manager, and technical producer. Equally influential are her travels across the globe to visit extraordinary cultures in Southeast Asia such as India, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Burma; in Europe to Sweden, Denmark, England, Italy, Portugal, and Spain; and in Central America to Mexico and Costa Rica among others. Closer to home, her influences include the rugged beauty of California's Northern Pacific coast and her majestic Sierra Nevada Mountains, as well as the grand southwestern high-deserts of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Nevada. This rich combination of people, places, languages, and cultures has deeply influenced Mara as a multi-media artist working with language across writing, sound, and performance in collaboration with musicians, dancers, and visual artists.

Inspired by the musical qualities of language, the architecture of text, the expansiveness of theory, and the interplay between nature and technology, Mara's creative process combines a passion for hybridity, discovery, and innovation. She is the author of four books: Containment Scenario: DisloInter MedTextId entCation: Horse Medicine (OBooks, 2009), lighthouse (Atelos, 2002), forthcoming: Ecnelis (a+bend, 2000), and aggregate (WOOD, 1998). With artistic practice as an incubator for emerging ideas and forms, Mara focuses her work largely on the topic of environment, from the personal to the political, as a creative vehicle for collective ideation and agency building. Her artistic process often involves the creation of a core manuscript from which a constellating family of related multi-media works emerge both as excerpt and exponent. As a poet that sings, a writer who performs, and a storyteller crafting multi-media experiences, Mara's latest installation-performance work, The Containment Scenario Project, explores the language of climate change through the lens of improvisational music-dance-theater as we attempt to name and un-name the ineffable.