She completed her doctoral work at Yale under Nathan Jacobson and wrote a dissertation entitled Inner Ideals and the Structure of Lie Algebras.

[9] Upon completing her doctoral degree, Benkart began her long career at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, first as a MacDuffee Instructor and eventually as a E. B.

[2] Her father served in the Army Corps of Engineers and her mother was a teacher in Youngstown's "ethnically rich south side.

[13] The complete description of Hamiltonian Lie Algebras (with Gregory, Osborn, Strade, Wilson) can stand alone, and also has applications in the theory of pro-p groups.

[13] In 2009, she published, jointly with Thomas Gregory and Alexander Premet,[8] the first complete proof of the recognition theorem for graded Lie algebras in characteristics at least 5.

[15] In a second series of works with Bruce Allison, Arturo Pianzola, Erhard Neher, et al. she determined the universal central covers of these algebras.

In a paper with Seok-Jin Kang and Kashiwara, Benkart extended the theory of crystal bases to quantum superalgebras.

[20] She served as the associate secretary of the American Mathematical Society for the Central Section from 2010 to 2020,[21] and was a member of the governing council in 1995 and from 2010 to 2021.

[33] In 2022, a tribute to her contributions to her field, "Gems from the Work of Georgia Benkart", appeared in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society.