Tara Liss-Mariño, Ph.D.

Tara Liss-Mariño is an educator and academic administrator with a particular focus on undergraduate student success and communication in higher education. She has also conducted qualitative research on labor in the creative industries.

Tara Liss-Mariño has over 15 years of experience in advising, teaching, administrative and leadership positions, all in support of undergraduate liberal arts students in and out of the classroom. She is currently the Director of Advising and Student Success in Drexel University’s College of Arts and Sciences, where she oversees a team of academic advisors and sits on the College’s leadership team. She previously spent a decade at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, most recently as the Associate Director of Student Communication in the College of Literature, Sciences, and the Arts where she oversaw communication and student engagement initiatives for the College’s 17,000+ students. While at U-M, she also worked as the Associate Director of the Michigan Research and Discovery Scholars living-learning community, a hybrid academic-residential program devoted to undergraduate research, and as a general academic advisor herself.

Liss-Mariño earned her PhD in communication from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, where her research focused on the intersection of new technologies, neoliberal creative work, and gendered labor. She also served as a Center for Teaching and Learning Graduate Fellow and a graduate associate in Penn’s College House System. She received her Bachelor of Arts in comparative literature and Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from Washington University in St. Louis and spent some years working in non-profit administration and project management.