Rui Liu received her MA in Literary Theory in 2002 from the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Tsinghua University, and her B.A. in Chinese Language and Literature in 1999 from Shaanxi Normal University in China.

After graduation, Liu served as a Language Instructor in the Inter-University Program (IUP) for Chinese Language Studies at Tsinghua University. She has also served as a language instructor in the Yale-China Language Center, Chinese University of Hong Kong (2009-2010). She had been a teaching associate for the Chinese language program in the Department of Asian Studies in 2005-2006 and 2012-2016.