Carolyn Ellis (PhD, Stony Brook University) is Distinguished University Professor Emerita at the University of South Florida. She has established an international reputation for her contributions to autoethnography and the narrative study of human life.

Her awards include the Charles H. Woolbert Research Award and the Distinguished Scholar Award, both from the National Communication Association (NCA); The Legacy Lifetime Award and best book and article awards from NCA’s Ethnography Division; a Lifetime Achievement Award in Qualitative Inquiry, and two best book awards from the International Center for Qualitative Inquiry at the University of Illinois; a Lifetime Achievement Award from The International Conference of Autoethnography in the UK; Charles Horton Cooley best book award from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction; Robert E. Park Award for outstanding research monograph from the American Sociological Association Section on Communities and Urban Sociology; two Goodall and Trujillo best books Awards in Narrative Ethnography; McKnight Foundation’s Most Valuable Doctoral Mentor Award; and The Honorary Distinction for special merits in the development of Autoethnography and Narrative Methods from Transdisciplinary Network of Qualitative Researchers (TSBJ) in Poland.

Dr. Ellis has produced two films on Holocaust survivors and published eight monographs, seven edited books, and more than 150 articles, chapters, and essays. A recent publication is the Handbook of Autoethnography (2nd ed., with T. Adams and S. Holman Jones). She has presented keynote addresses and workshops in seventeen countries at numerous institutions, including several times at the Qualitative Research Summer Intensive. One of the founders and a co-editor (with T. Adams and A. Bochner) of the Writing Lives: Ethnographic Narratives book series (Routledge), she takes an active role in the International Association of Autoethnography and Narrative.