McKenzie Wark (born 1961) is an Australian-born writer and scholar. Wark is known for her writings on media theory, critical theory, new media, and the Situationist International. Her best known works are A Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory. She is a professor of Media and Cultural Studies at The New School.

Wark was born in Newcastle, Australia in 1961. After her mother died in 1967, her father, architect Ross Kenneth Wark, raised her and her two older siblings. McKenzie received a bachelor's degree from Macquarie University in 1985, a Master's from the University of Technology, Sydney in 1990 and received a PhD in communications from Murdoch University in 1998.

In 1995, Wark had an affair with novelist Kathy Acker. Their email correspondence was published in the book I'm very into you (2007). In 1997, Wark met artist Christen Clifford in Williamsburg, New York. They married in 2000 and have two children together.

Wark is a trans woman. In 2017, Wark started her gender transition, and began taking hormones in 2018. Anticipating that hormone therapy might affect her ability to write, she took leave from the New School and completed the books Reverse Cowgirl, Philosophy for Spiders, Capital is Dead and Sensoria. Between 2018 and 2022, Wark primarily wrote articles and commissioned pieces, and became involved with queer and trans rave scenes in Brooklyn. In 2023, she published her first book since her leave of absence, Raving, a first-person account of raving.

In Virtual Geography, published in 1994, Wark offers a theory of what she calls the "weird global media event". Examples given in the book include the stock market crash of 1987, the Tiananmen square demonstrations of 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. She argues that the emergence of a global media space – a virtual geography – made out of increasingly pervasive lines of communication – vectors – was emerging as a more chaotic space than globalisation theory usually maintains.

Much of Wark's early engagement in public debate occurred in the Australian post-marxist quarterly Arena in the 1990s, through a number of articles and exchanges about the character of real abstraction, the meta-ideological character of post-structuralism, and the consequences of these issues for emancipatory social theory.

In two subsequent books, The Virtual Republic, published in 1997, and Celebrities, Culture and Cyberspace (1999), Wark turned her attention to the national cultural space of Australia. The first of these works examines the so-called 'culture wars' of the 1990s as symptomatic of struggles over the redefinition of Australian national identity and culture in an age of global media. The second of these 'Australian' books looked at the transformation of a social democratic idea of the 'popular' as a political idea into a more market-based and media-driven popular culture.

Both these studies grew out of Wark's experience as a public intellectual who participated in public controversies, mainly through her newspaper column in The Australian, a leading national daily.^{[citation needed]} She developed an approach based on participant observation, but adapted to the media sphere.