Torill Elvira Mortensen is an associate professor at the IT-University of Copenhagen since July 2010. Before that she was an associate professor in media and communication at Volda University College, Norway, where she worked from 1991 - 2010.

Her Ph D is on games and culture: Pleasures of the player, flow and control in online games (2003), and much of her research and publications are on games, players and playfulness more generally in social media. Her teaching is currently mainly concerned with Digital Rhetoric and Transmedial Storytelling.

Torill is part of the Department of Digital Design, the Culture and Communication research group and the Cult research initiative. Cult is a transmedial research initiative, studying online cultures and communication through a lens of humanities and social science. She is the coordinator of the international Play European Research consortium.

Torill was a member of the board for Norsk Tipping 2011 - 2015 , appointed by the Norwegian Minster of Culture. She served on the board of DiGRA, Digital Games Researchers Association from 2006 – 2010, and she was a founding member of the journal Gamestudies. She is active in several of the internet research communities, and was program chair for Association of Internet Research’s conference IR 11.0 in Stockholm 2010. She wrote Perceiving Play: the Art and Study of Computer Games (2009), a book on games research and the development of the field, and was editor, with Linderoth and Brown, of The Dark Side of Game Play: Controversial Issues in Playful Environments (2015).

2017 Torill Mortensen was visiting the University of Bologna, Italy, and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia. She is currently writing a book in relation to the Games and Transgressive Aesthetics project at the University of Bergen, Norway, in collaboration with Kristine Jørgensen (UiB).