Mackey is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Film and Media at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, where he taught for thirty years.
Target, a project in digital interactive drama that Mackey directed, won a CINDY Award from the Association of Visual Communicators, in Los Angeles, in 1989.
Dance on the Edge, Mackey's third feature, an experimental documentary about a vernacular celebration, premiered at the Figueira da Foz International Film Festival in Portugal in 1996.
His documentary website, Memory Palace: Vernacular Culture in the Digital Age, was nominated for a WebSage Streamers Award and was featured in Forbes magazine (1999).
Examples of this are conversations between friends, social gatherings and rituals, play and participatory sports, informal storytelling, musical jam sessions, cooking and gardening, homemade architecture, and street festivals.
Til the Cows Come Home (2014) documents citizen opposition to the closure of the prison farm at Collins Bay Institution, in Kingston, in 2010.