Eleni Schirmer is a freelance writer. Her writings have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Nation and Boston Review, and elsewhere.

Eleni was 2025-26 Spencer fellow at Columbia University’s School of Journalism. She held a postdoc at Concordia University’s Social Justice Centre, and a research associate with the Future of Finance Initiative at UCLA's Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy.

She has a Ph.D. in Educational Policy Studies from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her dissertation was a political biography of Wisconsin’s largest public sector union, the Milwaukee teachers’ union.

She also organizes with The Debt Collective, an experimental union of debtors.

She currently lives in Montréal, Quebec.

She’s represented by Caroline Eisenmann of Frances Goldin Literary Agency.