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
I’ll See You Maybe: Our Culture of Unaccountability
So there's this thing that everyone else seems to think is okay, which makes me feel like I'm a bitch because it bugs me, but I suspect that it actually bugs other people, we've just gotten so used to it that we don't think to complain.When I first moved to LA, someone told me about the RSVP problem. LA people hate to RSVP, so don't even ask for it, I was told. LA people love to play it by ear, either because of a fear of commitment, or a concern that something better might come along. In the...
Get Off Your Ass
During my first term at UCLA, I had the privilege of taking a class with Howard Suber. For anyone interested in how stories are told --be they in books or on the big screen -- or merely in human nature and the patterns of human behavior, his perspective is consistently enlightening and often entertaining. His book, The Power of Film, is one of the best books I have read about character and story.But all this is merely preface for what I'm getting at.Yesterday, during our last day of class,...
Dear Perks of Being a Wallflower: Thank You
Yesterday, I saw a movie called The Perks of Being a Wallflower. In typical fashion, I had dragged my heels on seeing it in theaters, because I’m often lazy about that. And it had been on my Netflix queue for a while, but I’d sort of avoided it, because even though I’d heard it was good, I still wasn’t that interested. It actually accidentally ended up on the top of my queue, and then in my mailbox, because I wasn’t paying attention. And then it sat on my shelf for a while as I avoided...