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
AIDS Awareness Day
In honor of AIDS Awareness Day, I'm just going to post some facts and figures. One of the things that upsets me most is the current complacency that seems to have become common around HIV/AIDS, so here are some reasons not to be complacent: In 2008, there were 126,964 women in the United States living with AIDS, with African American women accounting for 64 percent of the total. According to the Center for Disease Control, the rate of AIDS diagnosis for black women was approximately...
I Choose Olivia
One of my favorite things about the TV show Scandal is when it has its soapbox moments, when the show seems to be a vehicle for political or feminist insight, for arguments in favor of gun control or women's rights, when the writing is just so good that I feel like Shonda Rhimes may have hired some of the best speechwriters from DC to consult. The show often seems to work on multiple levels, the surface narrative and then the metaphorical punch of whatever is underneath addressing larger...
Nikki Sudden, The Coolest Man in the Room
[I was recently asked to write a short essay about Nikki Sudden for a book about him. So even though he died back in 2006, in some ways, this is my first time really coming to terms with it. Here's a brief ode to a great man.] The first time I met Nikki Sudden, I sat in his lap. No, it was not a lap dance, but the song was “Daddy’s Girl.” It was my song, I was singing it, I had the microphone, for once Nikki was just a face in the crowd. But I remember that face. I do not remember much else...