Mark Cameron Boyd was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas and took his baccalaureate in Fine Art at the University of Arkansas. He moved to Los Angeles in 1976, where he worked as an artist and musician, co-founded an alternative art space, and traveled to France and Germany as publicist for the Nina Hagen Band. He later taught his self-designed courses in film noir and pop culture for the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena until 1993. Boyd moved to Maryland in 1996, completing his MFA in Painting at the University of Maryland in 1999.

Since 1999, Boyd has taught drawing, painting, collage and self-designed art theory courses for a number of universities, including the Corcoran College of Art and Design. In 2013, he began teaching his self-designed course, "Art as Social Practice, " at the Corcoran to engage both his students and the public in his ongoing practice of participatory text-based installations.

Boyd’s artwork explores "text as a language for painting" by literally using his original writings as the subject of his works. Boyd’s solo exhibition, "Logocentric Playground," shown at American University Museum at Katzen Arts Center in 2006, expanded his practice to participatory art, as visitors were invited to write directly upon his blackboard panel installation. Boyd has shown his work at the Center for the Arts Gallery at Towson University, University of Maryland’s Stamp Gallery and other commercial galleries in Washington, D.C. He has also had solo shows at the Catholic University of America and the Hamiltonian Gallery. In 2007, Boyd was a Janet and Walter Sondheim Prize Semi-Finalist and exhibited at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. In 2014, Boyd presented his curatorial project, "Readymade at 100," in celebration of Marcel Duchamp that was mounted at the Katzen Arts Center.

In 2016 Boyd was invited by the U.S. State Department's Arts in Embassies program to do an Artist Exchange in San Jose, Costa Rica. While there, he collaborated with six local artists on his blackboard installation in Spanish and English; the installation was launched for public participation at the opening reception for "Reflections on Diversity" at the U.S. Ambassador's residence. The U.S. Embassy also organized a series of lectures at San Jose universities and museums for Boyd to speak on social practice and participatory art, where he demonstrated his bisected-text art practice, inviting the students and audiences to participate in the artwork on-site.

Boyd lives and works in Silver Spring, MD, and continues to explore ways to advance social practice and participatory art, writing about and lecturing on contemporary art theory and practice.