Elizabeth Currid-Halkett is the James Irvine Chair in Urban and Regional Planning and professor of public policy at the Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on the arts and culture and most recently, the American consumer economy.

She is the author of three books The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art and Music Drive New York City (Princeton University Press 2007), Starstruck: The Business of Celebrity (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010) and The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class (Princeton University Press 2017).

Her work has been featured in numerous national and international media outlets including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Salon, the Economist, the New Yorker, and the Times Literary Supplement.

She received her PhD from Columbia University and now lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two sons.