Dr. Mary Elizabeth (“M.E.”) Luka is an Assistant Professor of Arts, Media & Culture Management at the Department of Arts, Culture, Media (UTSC), with a cross-appointment at the Faculty of Information (iSchool). Dr. Luka is an award-winning scholar, activist and digital media producer for arts, social enterprises, broadcasting and telecommunications, and creative management policy, planning and practice. She studies modes and meanings of creativity and innovation in the digital age, to investigate how arts, culture, media and civic sectors are networked together. Her research examines co-creative and collaborative production, distribution and dissemination in the intersecting fields of media, arts and culture.

M.E. is currently working on a manuscript for McGill-Queen’s University Press provisionally titled A(rtspots) to ZeD: digitizing arts documentary in Canada. Recent publications include articles and chapters in Information, Communication & Society, 2019; Public, 2018; Canadian Theatre Review, 2019; Social Media & Society, 2018; Internet Research Ethics for the Social Age: New Cases and Challenges (2017); Urban Encounters: Art and the Public (2017); Diverse Spaces: Examining Identity, Heritage and Community within Canadian Public Culture (2013); Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 2014; and Canadian Journal of Communication, 2017, 2019.

Dr. Luka holds a Connaught New Researcher Fellowship titled Understanding how arts and creative networks operate as pivots for social innovation in Canada, which is digitally mapping almost 200 arts and culture-based creative hubs and networks in Canada and globally. Her Banting Fellowship, From Creative Citizenship to Globally-Networked Cultural Collaboration, launched this comparative international research project examining state-of-the-art creative hubs and partnerships in Canada, the UK and Australia. Dr. Luka is a founding member of the nascent Critical Digital Methods Institute at UTSC, and a co-applicant on Archive/Counter-Archive: Activating Canada's Moving Image Heritage, a six-year national partnership involving several universities and cultural organizations in the management of marginalized and underrepresented media archives. She also partners with Mass Culture to generate cultural research in Canada, and has been commissioned by the Department of Canadian Heritage to conduct research and analyse creative hubs and networks in Canada. Dr. Luka was PI on a SSHRC connection grant that brought together more than 500 people in 14 seminars internationally for an investigation of digital and critical research methods in technoculture. In her role at the iDoc project at the University of Alberta, Dr. Luka applied her expertise to documenting and analysing social engagement in the $75 million CFREF-funded Future Energy Systems initiative. Her research draws on creative and cultural studies; arts, media and cultural management theory; digital humanities, social sciences and urban development practices; and leading practices in digital data management, including audience, client and community engagement and feminist science and technology studies (STS).

Mary Elizabeth is a member of the Advisory Board for Aarhus University’s Futuremaking initiative, on the editorial board of Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies, and is co-editor of three special issues of Information, Communication & Society (2018-2021) featuring work emerging from annual conferences of the international Association of Internet Researchers. She is Past Chair of the Board for Arts Nova Scotia, the provincial funding agency, as well as a past member of the Creative Nova Scotia Leadership Council, NSCAD University’s Board of Directors, and of the Provincial and Territorial Advisory Group of Cultural Human Resources Council. Dr. Luka is a founding member of the public art and research group, Narratives in Space + Time Society, which intervenes in site-specific spaces to generate art and storytelling practices as modes of civic engagement, including through the use of GIS, augmented reality, digital media and mobile device software applications.