Mara focuses on opera staging and theories of acting. Her interests lie in how artistic process can be revealed to and noticed by audiences. She has a forthcoming article in Diderot Studies on theatrical asides in the Paradoxe sur le comédien and listening practices in the 18th-c. Parisian theater. She has presented at the Transnational Opera Studies Conference on backstage documentaries and at the Northern California Chapter of the American Musicological Society on acting surprised. In Fall 2022, she and Collin Ziegler co-convened the conference Contemporary Opera on Stage: Institutions and Visions, which explored the creative possibilities of the proscenium stage and featured opera historians alongside members of the SF Opera creative team and John Adams. In addition to her graduate studies, she sings with small opera companies around the Bay Area.