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 Was an LAPD Reject (part two)
We ran laps around the track and on the streets around the academy. If you were in the beginner group, you ran approximately two miles on the local streets, plus the endless laps the supervisor would inflict upon us whenever our rows weren't straight enough or someone made the mistake of making eye contact. If you were in the intermediate group, you ran four to six miles. If you were advanced, you ran eight.The tricky part was that if the intermediate and advanced groups weren't big enough,...
An Ode to Love
A really talented artist died today. I didn't know Carlos Batts well, but he and his wife, April Flores, were so in love and just exuded so much sweetness, that I've been sad all day thinking about him and about her. I've been single for a long time, but watching the two of them together reminded me of how love can--and should--be. It was love at first sight, or as April says, lust at first sight. They had been married for ten years, during which not only did they sustain a functional...
On Miley, Disney, Elton and the Lost Art of Creativity
Will Rogers once said, ""Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don't have for something they don't need." Advertising is the art of persuading you to buy -- and then buy some more.But if it was that simple, Miley's album would have sold through the roof. After all, who hasn't heard about her these last few weeks? Few people have mastered the art of (over)exposure in quite the way she has. Miley -- and Twerkgate -- has been everywhere. And yet Bangerz, her latest...