Diane Lillo-Martin is a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut. She is currently the Director of the university's Cognitive Sciences Program as well as its Coordinator of American Sign Language Studies. Lillo-Martin is additionally the board chair of the Sign Language Linguistics Society and a senior scientist at Haskins Laboratories, as well as a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America. Lillo-Martin received her PhD in 1986 from the University of California, San Diego, under the supervision of Edward Klima.