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
Deconstructing Dahlia: The FM Magazine Interview
(Photos by Daisy Rast.)
Haters Gonna Hate
The line at the supermarket register today was long and moving slowly. This gave me ample time to study the covers of all the magazines I never read. According to them, Barbra Streisand is a bitch and James Brolin wants a divorce, Kim is making Khloe feel miserable and alone…and the list goes on. And on. The fact that these magazines are there, day after day, taking up prime real estate in the face of bored and impatient shoppers, is all the proof I need that people are reading them, as well...
Waiting for Hefner
[Another one from the archives.] Unless you had a VIP ticket, everyone was instructed, via email, to park in a parking garage in Century City. From there, a shuttle would take us to the mansion. I get to the parking garage at 9pm, half an hour after check in began. Quite a few people are there already – mostly men, in groups of three or four. I don’t want to make eye contact, because I am not ready yet for interaction, but I check them out of the corner of my eye. Men apparently feel...