Marita Sturken is Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, and associate faculty in the Department of Cinema Studies in the Tisch School of the Arts. She was department chair from 2009 until 2013. She teaches courses in visual culture, cultural memory, and consumerism.

Marita Sturken is the author of Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (University of California Press, 1997), Thelma & Louise (British Film Institute Modern Classics series, 2009), and Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (with Lisa Cartwright, Oxford University Press, Third Edition 2017), and Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism From Oklahoma City to Ground Zero(Duke University Press, 2007), which won the 2007-2008 Transdisciplinary Humanities Book Award from the Institute for Humanities Research, Arizona State University. Her books have been translated into Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Czech, and Hebrew.

Her essays have been published in Representations, Public Culture, Memory Studies, American Quarterly, Journal of Visual Culture, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, International Journal of Cultural Studies, International Journal of Communication, American Ethnologist, Social Text, History and Theory, Positions, and Afterimage, among others. She was editor of American Quarterly from 2003 until 2006.

Sturken has a Ph.D. (1992) from the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and she has previously taught at the University of California, San Diego, and the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California (from 1994 until 2005). She was the Bonnier Guest Professor at the University of Stockholm in 2010, and since 2014 has taught regularly in the Doctoral Program in Artistic Studies at Universidade Nova de Lisboa in Lisbon, Portugal.