Elena Maris is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Prior to joining UIC, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research-New England. She received her Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

Her research is focused on media, technology, and society. Her work is concerned with the interactions and tensions between media/tech industries and users, particularly their uses of technology to understand and influence one another. She also studies how people experience and leverage their identities through their experiences with popular culture, technology, and the internet.

Maris's research has been published in journals like New Media & Society, the International Journal of Communication, Critical Studies in Media Communication, the European Journal of Cultural Studies, and Feminist Media Studies. Her research has been featured in outlets like The New York Times, Wired, Marketplace, and Forbes. She has advised and shared her insights with organizations and companies like Tumblr, Xbox, The Sundance Institute, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Areas of Expertise: critical data and algorithm studies; tech policy; social context and AI; user/industry relations; platform politics; algorithmic inequality; social media; popular culture; digital fandom; online communities; audience measurement and user metrics; identity (gender, race, and sexuality) and marginalized/vulnerable users