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
Dallas Buyers Club: The FDA, Then and Now — When Did Things Get So Screwed Up?
In many ways, Dallas Buyers Club feels like a period piece. You’ve got the seventies outfits and hairstyles, the classic microfiche research scene, the vintage newspaper headlines, the boxy Cadillacs, and, of course, the early days of the AIDS virus. For all those reasons, it is a film worth seeing. It is a documentary of an important time in American social and medical history, and it paints an incredible portrait of the impact one man had, not only on the way institutions responded to the...
A Self-Portrait in Stages: Part Four, Leaving NYC
[As I go through massive change in my life at the moment, I am reminded of those other moments of massive change in my life, when I left NYC for Berlin, and then when I left Berlin for LA. I'm revisiting those changes partly out of nostalgia and partly as a way to feel more grounded and complete now. As part of that process, I am sharing some entries from my diary as I remind myself of what that time felt like.]Saturday, October 04, 2003DECISION: Berlin is the right move for me right now -- it...
Queen of Hearts: A Novel by Dahlia Schweitzer (excerpt)
Have you bought your copy of QUEEN OF HEARTS yet...?I was as mesmerized by the seeming impossibility of the performance as by the action happening in my head. I tried desperately to block it out, embarrassed as if everyone could see it and would know what I was thinking. I crossed my legs, as if that would somehow make the scene in my head fade to black, but my face still flushed with a guilty shame. Mark remained oblivious while I imagined those cards falling down upon my skin, my body...