Alisa Perren is a professor in the UT Austin Department of Radio-Television-Film as well as RTF’s Director of Industry Relations. In this role, she is the point person between the RTF department and entertainment industry professionals.
Her research explores how current and aspiring industry professionals in film, TV, and digital media are responding to transformations in both Hollywood and Texas in the streaming era. At the undergraduate level, Dr. Perren teaches courses focused on streaming media, the business of Hollywood, the business of unscripted television, and US television history. At the graduate level, Dr. Perren’s courses cover media industry studies, television studies, streaming media, and qualitative research methods.
She is currently completing a co-authored book project for Routledge titled Navigating Work in the Media Industries (forthcoming). In addition, she recently served as Project Lead on a report involving a team of Radio-Television-Film researchers titled Roadmap to the Texas Media Industries: The Passage of the 2025 Film Incentive and Beyond. Dr. Perren continues to examine the Texas media ecosystem past and present, with her ongoing research focused on the economic, cultural, and creative impact of film incentives in Texas specifically and across the United States more broadly.
Dr. Perren is co-editor of Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method (2009, with Jennifer Holt), author of Indie, Inc.: Miramax and the Transformation of Hollywood in the 1990s (2012), and co-author of The American Comic Book Industry and Hollywood (2021, with Gregory Steirer). She is also series editor of the International Screen Industries series for the British Film Institute with Yannis Tzioumakis. Her work has also appeared in a range of peer-reviewed journals and edited collections.
From 2012 to 2017, Dr. Perren co-founded and previously served as co-managing editor for the online, peer-reviewed, open-access journal, Media Industries. She continues to be a member of the Media Industries journal’s editorial collective. In addition, from 2010 to 2013, she was Coordinating Editor for In Media Res, an online project experimenting with collaborative, multi-modal forms of scholarship.
Presently, she is the organizer of Media Industry Conversations, a speaker series through which industry professionals discuss today’s evolving media landscape. She has been a media industry consultant and speaker on topics such as changing work conditions in Hollywood and shifts in film and television distribution practices in the streaming era.
