Monica Mayer was born in Mexico City in 1954. She studied visual arts at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas (ENAP) in Mexico y later obtained an M.A. in Sociology of Art from Goddard College in the US. She has exhibited widely in Mexico and abroad, both individually as well as in group exhibitions and has presented over 100 performances.

Mayer has a weekly column in El Universal newspaper since 1989 and has published in different national and international magazines among them Performance Research (Great Britain). She is a founding member of the feminist art group Polvo de Gallina Negra (1983-1993) with Maris Bustamante and of the conceptual space Pinto mi Raya with Víctor Lerma.