Mary Wood Hinman was born on February 14, 1878 in the state of Ohio. She began her career as a teacher to the local neighborhood children as a teenager as a way to help her family through financial distress. She later traveled to Europe where she had the opportunity to study gymnastics and folk dancing. Hinman eventually came back to America and settled in Chicago, Illinois where she developed a teacher-training school that prepared women to teach folk dances in parks, schools and settlement houses. In 1898, she worked with Jane Addams and her colleagues at Hull House where she taught folk dancing to immigrants, and in 1905 she ventured into business when she opened the Hinman School of Folk Dancing. From around 1906 to 1919, Hinman worked with philosopher, psychologist and education reformer John Dewey where they developed dancing and gymnastics programs as part of the kindergarten through high school curriculum for what is now the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. It was at the University of Chicago where Hinman also took part in choreographing and writing songs for plays and jigs, such as "The Pseudo-Suffragettes", "The Pursuit of Portia", and "The Wooing of Nan" for the English Language and Literature Department. She later moved from Illinois to New York where she helped to establish the Folk Festival Council of New York in 1930 and taught as well as developed courses at a university that is now known as The New School in Manhattan around 1932. Mary Wood Hinman retired from her teaching career in 1938 and relocated once more to Los Angeles, California where she lived until she passed away on July 4, 1952.