Dene Grigar work has focused on the creation, curation, preservation, and criticism of Electronic Literature, specifically building multimedial environments and experiences for live performance, installations, and curated spaces; desktop computers; and mobile media devices.

As a graduate student at the University of Texas at Dallas in the early 1990s, she was introduced to the field by noted hypertext theorist Nancy Kaplan, experimenting with the hypertext essay. Several of these were published in journals like Kairos and academic writing. A decade later she was introduced to the Electronic Literature Organization at the 2001 NEH Summer Seminar led by N. Katherine Hayles.

Currently, Grigar is Professor and Director of The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program at Washington State University Vancouver She has authored 14 media works such as “Curlew” (2014), “A Villager’s Tale” (2011), the “24-Hour Micro E-Lit Project” (2009), “When Ghosts Will Die” (2008), and “Fallow Field: A Story in Two Parts" (2005), as well as 52 scholarly articles. Her exhibits of electronic literature and media art have been mounted at the Library of Congress and for the Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) and the Modern Language Association (MLA), among other venues. With Stuart Moulthrop (U of Wisconsin Milwaukee) she was the recipient of a 2013 NEH Start Up grant to support the digital preservation of early electronic literature, a project that culminated in an open-source, multimedia book entitled Pathfinders and book of media art criticism, entitled Traversals, for The MIT Press. Her recent book, Rebooting Electronic Literature: Documenting Pre-Web Born Digital Literature. She is President of the Electronic Literature Organization and Associate Editor of Leonardo Reviews and Literary Studies in the Digital Age. In 2017 She was awarded the Louis E. and Stella G. Buchanan Distinguished Professorship by WSU. She also directs the Electronic Literature Lab at Washington State University Vancouver.