Alisa Perren is a professor in the UT Austin Department of Radio-Television-Film (RTF), Director of the Center for Entertainment and Media Industries, and, as of January 2025, she is also RTF’s Director of Industry Relations. In this role, she serves as the point person between the RTF department and entertainment industry professionals.
Dr. Perren is co-editor of Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method (2009), 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). Her work has appeared in a range of publications, including Film Quarterly, Journal of Film and Video, Journal of Popular Film & Television, Television & New Media, Cinema Journal, and The Routledge Companion to Media Industries.
Perren co-founded and previously served as co-managing editor for the online, peer-reviewed, open-access journal, Media Industries, from 2012 to 2017. She continues to be a member of the Media Industries 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 also served as a media industry consultant and speaker on topics such as changing work conditions and shifts in streaming distribution practices.