Ellen Rees is a native of Washington state. She received her Ph.D. in Scandinavian Languages and Literature from the University of Washington in 1995 with a specialization in twentieth-century literature.  She was a Fulbright scholar to Norway and held a CIMO postdoctoral research fellowship in Finland.  She taught for eight years at Arizona State University before joining the faculty of the University of Oregon in 2004, where she is now Associate Professor of Scandinavian Studies.

She has written two books and numerous articles on a wide variety of twentieth-century Scandinavian fiction and film, including an article on three Danish "Dogma 95" films. She is married to a Norwegian citizen and has a young son.