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
On HBO’s Girls and Hannah and Why She Matters
I am one episode away from finishing season 3 of Girls.To be honest, I have not been a huge fan of this season, until recently. The first half of the season seemed to lack the mastery that seasons 1 and 2 oozed. There was a floundering, a lack of intentionality and focus, that bugged me. I kept watching, of course, because I love Lena, and I love what the show tries to accomplish. Even in its failures, it is still one of the most interesting shows on television at the moment. However, around...
An Artist’s Manifesto
Being an artist requires an excessive amount of confidence. Some might even say ego. Because who else is foolish enough to create something out of nothing? Who else is foolish enough to create something out of nothing and believe that it matters -- that somehow the world needs to see it or hear it or read it?John Lennon once said that "If being an egomaniac means I believe in what I do and in my art or music, then in that respect you can call me that..I believe in what I do, and I'll say it.”...
Fuck You Pink
My favorite color is fuchsia. I call it fuck you pink. (Get it?) I didn't grow up in one of those households where everything I had was pink. I didn't have twinkly stars on things, or pink glittery streamers on my bicycle. My mother never wore makeup so no one taught me how to (not only was I not encouraged to do so, but I was actively discouraged from doing so), combat boots were my shoe of choice for years, and despite a few illicit run-ins with lipgloss my freshman year of high school, the...