Mara has a Master's degree in Economics from the University of Hartford, Connecticut, and another Master's in Business Administration from the Institute of Business Administration, Pakistan. Mara's film training is based on classes she took in 2006 at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY. She took a class on the Documentary Form and another one in Final Cut Pro. In 2007 she took a Documentary Workshop at RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology) in order to start editing her film.

Mara has worked as Senior Financial Analyst for the Sentry Group in Rochester (NY), for Alstom Power in Windsor (CT), for Diageo in Hartford (CT), and for Societe Generale and Imperial Chemical Industries in Pakistan. Her job involved designing mathematical models for economic analysis and business simulations. Despite her training in finance and economics, Mara was always attracted to art, film and literature. In 2003 she took the leap, resigning from her job at the Sentry Group to take art classes at Nazareth College. She never looked back.

The socio-political climate that had begun to change in America after 9/11, was becoming more and more alarming every year. It was frustrating for Mara, a Pakistani-American Muslim, to be constantly in the news yet never have a chance to be part of the discourse. She felt compelled to make the voices of people like herself heard in America. She began by writing but found, to her dismay, that mainstream media did not want to hear a different perspective. She then thought of film – the most powerful and widest reaching medium possible. She had no training in film, so she went to school and began getting oriented on how to make a documentary. She began shooting “The Muslims I Know” in 2006. It was during an 11-week documentary workshop she took at the Rochester Institute of Technology (with filmmaker Cat Ashworth) that she went from 30-40 hours of uncut captured video to the hour long story she wanted to tell.

Mara's production company is Neelum Films. She is a member of Women in Film and Television Rochester and of Rochester Film Lab, since 2007.