Ellen Handler Spitz is a writer, lecturer, and scholar who currently holds the Honors College Professorship of Visual Arts at University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), where she has taught interdisciplinary seminars in aesthetics, literature, psychology, and the visual arts since 2001. After public and private secondary education in New York and England, she attended the University of Chicago, Barnard College (A.B.), Harvard University (M.A.T.), and Columbia University, where she was awarded the Ph.D. in 1983.

She is the author of Art and Psyche (Yale University Press, 1985), Image and Insight (Columbia University Press, 1991), Museums of the Mind (Yale University Press, 1994), Inside Picture Books (Yale University Press, 1999), and The Brightening Glance (Pantheon Books, 2006; Anchor-Vintage Books, 2007). With several colleagues, she co-edited Freud and Forbidden Knowledge (Columbia University Press, 1994) and Bertolucci's The Last Emperor: Multiple Takes (Wayne State University Press, 1998). She has published numerous articles, chapters, and reviews publications such as the Journal of Aesthetic Education, American Imago, The New York Times Book Review and The Baltimore Sun.