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
He Wanted to Break Me — Or Why I Won’t Judge Janay Palmer
The typical response to public incidents of domestic violence, like the recent elevator one with Ray Rice and Janay Palmer or the older one between Rihanna and Chris Brown, is often shock and confusion. Why won't she leave him? Why does she put up with it? Most people are savvy enough to know that domestic violence rarely happens once. So why would anyone stick around for more? I was one of those people. An ardent feminist, I was all pro-choice and pro-empowerment. I led the National...
On Being Queer and Jewish — And Why Neither Should Matter
I never thought of my Jewishness as a political statement. Until now.Honestly, I never thought much about my Jewishness at all. Until now.I went to a private Hebrew school for two years as a kid, but that was mainly because my mother also taught there. I also went to some kind of weekend Hebrew school when I was very little, but my memories of that are entirely fuzzy. Arts and crafts were probably involved.Since my bat mitzvah, I’ve probably been to synagogue fewer than five times. I can’t...
Armour and Artifice
My essay on accessories and Office Killer is out in the current issue of FM magazine. Here are some screenshots if you're curious! You can find the book here.