Mary Fogarty is Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance. Her research interests encompass participatory and collaborative art-making practices that bring together amateurs and professionals, high and low cultural forms, popular culture, humor, and art-world aesthetics and sensibilities. Her current work explores practices including videomaking, dancing, music-making, and street arts, with an extended focus on everyday life and the ordinary, especially the often-unnoticed creativity and generosity that emerge through everyday encounters and activities.

She is co-editor, with Imani Kai Johnson, of The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Dance Studies and, with Mark Evans, of Movies, Moves, and Music: The Sonic World of Dance Films. With Jason Ng, she co-edited a double special issue on “Breaking and the Olympics” for Global Hip Hop Studies and organized an international speaker series leading up to the event. She also co-edited the special issue “Taking Taylor Seriously” for Contemporary Music Review with Gina Arnold.

Her scholarship has appeared in publications including That’s The Joint! The Hip Hop Studies Reader (third edition), The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen, The Routledge Reader on the Sociology of Music, Hip-Hop Archives: The Politics and Poetics of Knowledge Production, We Still Here: Hip Hop North of the 49th Parallel, The Oxford Handbook of Dance Competition, Ageing and Youth Culture: Music, Style and Identity, and The Oxford Handbook of Punk Rock.

She was Editor of IASPM Journal and currently serves on the editorial boards of Global Hip Hop Studies and DIY, Alternative Cultures & Society, as well as the advisory board of IASPM. She has served as President of IASPM-Canada and Chair of Pop Moves Americas. Pop Moves is a research network she co-founded while she was a Lecturer at the University of East London, UK.

Her choreographic work includes SoundCheck, a collaboration with Venezuelan-born, Toronto-based musician La Clem and the York Dance Ensemble, which premiered in 2024. She has also served as a judge and head judge at major international Breaking competitions, including events in the Olympic qualification process.

Fogarty has been an invited scholar and speaker at institutions and venues including New York University, the Centre national de la danse (Paris), Sadler’s Wells (London), the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (NYC), Casa da Música (Porto), the University of Southern California, and Cornell University, as well as universities and festivals across Europe, North America, and Australia. Her commentary on dance, music, and popular culture has appeared in outlets including The New York Times, Time, The Washington Post, and CBC.