Mary Pena's work explores intersections of race and gender, visual and material culture, urban ecology, embodiment, and Afro-diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean. Her current book project examines the politics and aesthetics of spatial change in Puerto Plata, an Atlantic port city in the Dominican Republic. The project traces the city's efforts to construct an idealized architectural past while highlighting how Afro-Dominican women engage with the shifting built environment. Pena's strong interests in multimodal scholarship, critical digital humanities, and curation has led to collaborations with art and cultural spaces in the U.S., curating exhibitions that include Alive in their garden (2022), Un-bound (2023), and most recently, Coastal Relations: Enacting Diaspora (2024).

Her publications have appeared in Fieldsights on Cultural Anthropology, entanglements, Open Cultural Studies, Absinthe Journal, and the edited volume Gender: Space. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Society of Visual Anthropology. She was previously a Princeton Mellon Fellow in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities at Princeton University, a co-founder of the Making Sensory Ethnography working group, and has served as a solidarity fellow with the Diaspora Solidarities Lab.