Elena Tajima Creef is a Professor of Women's & Gender Studies at Wellesley College where she teaches courses on Asian/American women in film, Techno-Orientalism, the multicultural American West, and Elvis Presley and 1950s America.  She has a PhD from the History of Consciousness program at UC Santa Cruz and a BA and MA in English.  She is the author of “Shadow Traces: Seeing Japanese/American and Ainu Women in Photograph Archives” (University of Illinois Press, 2022), "Imaging Japanese America: The Visual Construction of Citizenship, Nation, and the Body" (NYU Press 2004), and has published widely in the fields of Asian American film, art, and popular culture. Her creative work has been published in "The North Carolina Literary Review" and her memoir essay, "Notes from a Fragmented Daughter," originally published in Gloria Anzaldua's celebrated anthology, "Hacienda Caras: Making Face, Making Soul" (1990) has been reprinted in "The Penguin Book of Women's Humor" (NY: Penguin Books, 1996) and "Intersecting Circles: The Voices of Hapa Women in Poetry and Prose" (Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge Press, 1999).  

Her current research, “36 Views of a Horse Nation,” focuses on horse culture in the Dakotas. 

She lives in a one-hundred year old farmhouse near Wellesley College with her son and a Corgi.