About Dahlia
DAHLIA SCHWEITZER is a pop culture critic, writer, and professor. Described by Vogue as “sexy, rebellious, and cool,” Schweitzer writes about film, television, music, gender, identity, and everything in between. She studied at Wesleyan University, lived and worked in New York City and Berlin, and completed her MA and PhD at the Art Center College of Design and UCLA. She is currently chair of the Film and Media department at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City.
In addition to her books, Dahlia has essays in publications including Cinema Journal, Journal of Popular Film and Television, Hyperallergic, Jump Cut, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and The Journal of Popular Culture. She has also released several albums of electronic music, including Plastique and Original Pickup.
Professor
As a professor of film and media studies, Dahlia exposes her students to a variety of theoretical approaches and cinematic techniques, asking them to approach both with analytical inquisitiveness. Her aim is to pass her own curiosity on to her students, encouraging them to think across their classes and experiences to create intellectual connections between course materials and the world in which they live. She strives to remind her students that the loudest voice is not necessarily correct, and in so doing, helps them find their own.
Media Critic
Declared “one of the world’s leading analysts of popular culture” by renowned author Toby Miller, Dahlia writes about film, television, music, gender, identity, and everything in between. Her work can be found across mainstream, academic, and emergent channels in both long and short form. Repeatedly drawn to popular culture, Dahlia loves to analyze and unpack cultural artifacts in order to explore how they reflect social and historical issues, as well as looking at how they reinforce or interrogate common cultural assumptions.
Author
Dahlia has written numerous books exploring aspects of film and television. Regardless of the topic—serial killers, private detectives, or even zombies—all of her writing engages directly with questions of self versus other, private versus public space, examining depictions of gender, identity, and race. She traces how these depictions evolve and examines what they mean about our changing world. In her latest project, Dahlia explores the ways haunted homes have become a venue for dramatizing anxieties about family, gender, race, and economic collapse.
Books
Cindy Sherman’s
Office Killer
Going
Viral
L.A.
Private Eyes
Haunted
Homes
Blog
Why Are We So Furious with ‘Girls’?
A recent episode of the HBO television show Girls threw audience members into a frenzy. Specifically, it threw audience members affiliated with academia into a frenzy. The cause of the uproar? At the end of the sixth and final season, Hannah Horvath (the character played by Lena Dunham) receives what appears to be a cushy academic job (cushy=with benefits and supplying enough rent to afford a house) despite not having adjunct teaching experience or a terminal degree. Beyond this, she...
I Don’t Want Prayers. I Want Gay Rights.
By now, most people have heard of the horrific tragedy that occurred late Saturday night in the Orlando, Florida nightclub. My social media has been full of people mourning the deaths of people who were executed for no other reason than their sexuality, for no other reason than Omar Mateen was angered by the sight of two men kissing. The deaths of 49 people -- and the wounding of 53 -- is a terrible loss, and the anger many people feel about Mateen's ability to obtain his artillery, despite...
Office Killer Finds Its Place
Almost two decades ago, I saw a little movie called Office Killer. When I say “little,” I don’t mean that it lacked style or attitude or impact. When I say “little,” I mean that it only grossed $76,000. By no means should this paltry sum indicate empty theaters, Molly Ringwald and Carol Kane and Jeanne Tripplehorn performing for miniscule ticket sales. Rather, the movie had no chance to make money because Miramax bought it and buried it – and buried it has remained to this day. Until last...