Outi Hakola is a docent in Area and Cultural Studies (University of Helsinki) and a docent in societal media studies (University of Turku). Currently, she works as a university lecturer in qualitative research methods at University of Eastern Finland. Her expertise includes cultural studies, film and television studies, death studies, and  humour studies. She is expert in mediatisation of death and dying, cultural theories, narratology, and art criticism.

Her background is in film, television and literature studies. She has Master of Arts degrees in both Media Studies (2005) and Comparative Literature (2003) from the University of Turku, where she defended her dissertation, Rhetoric of Death and Generic Addressing of Viewers in American Living Dead Films, in 2011. After her PhD she worked at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies as a programme coordinator for Human Mortality project (2011-2013), at the Department of Radio-Television-Film (University of Texas at Austin, United States) as visiting researcher (2013-2014), and as a university lecturer in North American Studies (Area and Cultural Studies, University of Helsinki, 2014-2017). Most recently, she worked as a Academy of Finland Research Fellow at the Area and Cultural Studies (University of Helsinki, 2017-2022). Her research project, Constructing Good Death, deals with documentary films on end-of-life issues.