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 backcountry. Summers and weekends were spent exploring the remote wilderness areas of the Rocky Mountains with her family, which fostered a strong affinity for the natural world. During the urban 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 started listening to public radio, fell in love with critical discourse, and began protesting injustice.

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 writing, arts, 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 finished her MFA in English Literature and Creative Writing (with cross-disciplinary work in music and live media performance) at Mills College in the mid 2000's studying with Stephen Ratcliffe, Juliana Spahr, Fred Frith, Molly Holm, Maggie Payne, Katherine Mezur, Walter Lew, and Pauline Oliveros.

Mara’s creative work has been inspired and infused by the wild beauty and constantly evolving experimental arts and culture of the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as her fine-arts work in multi-media storytelling and extended platform publishing, and her commercial work in the interactive media sector as a technical producer and design director. Equally influential are her travels across the globe to visit extraordinary cultures in India, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Sweden, England, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Croatia, and Mexico, as well as journies along California's northern Pacific coast and through her magestic Sierra Mountains, and across the grand southwestern deserts of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada. This rich combination of people and places has shaped Mara into a multi-media artist working with language across writing, sound, and performance, and regularly collaborating with musicians, dancers, visual artists, scientists, and other experts in their fields.

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 experimental forms. Focusing her work largely on the topic of environment, from the personal to the political, Mara's artistic process often involves the creation of a core manuscript such as lighthouse, or more recently Containment Scenario, 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.