Mary N. Woods is the author of seminal works about architectural education and practice; and film, photography, and the built environment: Women Architects in India: Histories of Practice in Mumbai and Delhi (2016); Beyond the Architect's Eye: Photographs of the American Built Environment (2013, 2009); and From Craft to Profession: Practice of Architecture in 19th-Century America (1999). She and director Vani Subramanian released Cinema Pe Cinema, a documentary film about  India’s single-screen cinemas, in 2024. 

In 1991 Woods became the first woman tenured in Cornell's architecture department, founded in 1871. She was the inaugural Michael McCarthy Professor of Architectural Theory and received the Tau Sigma Delta Silver Medal for distinguished scholarship in 2018. She has received grants and fellowships from: Clarence Stein Institute; Canadian Centre for Architecture; Fulbright; American Institute of Indian Studies; Graham Foundation; Center for Creative Photography; Georgia O’Keeffe Museum; and Buell Center, Columbia University. She received her B. A., magna cum laude, Duke University and M. A., M. Phil., and Ph.D., Columbia University. 

Current projects include:  essays on reinventing and reimagining single screens in India and Clarence Stein’s movie theatres as community architecture; exhibition and catalog on Mumbai's architecture of the night with photographer Chirodeep Chaudhuri; and book about  postindustrial landscapes in India and the US with Dr. Annie Schentag, historian and preservationist, and Nipun Prabhakar, architect and photographer.