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 and Berlin, and then moved to Los Angeles to complete her graduate degrees at the Art Center College of Design and UCLA. She currently teaches in the Film and Media department at the Fashion Institute of Technology.
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
When Dave Chappelle tried to make a room full of people laugh at me, it backfired, and they laughed at him. But I’m not laughing.
Yesterday, I had lunch with a good friend at a restaurant in New York that shares a bathroom with the adjacent comedy club. It's a little awkward, but it's a bathroom, you just have to walk through the comedy club to get to it. I've done it many times, without incident. Until yesterday, when Dave Chappelle decided I'd make a fun target. As I was walking past the stage, I could hear him calling out "miss, miss." I ignored him, since I was really just there to use the bathroom, and what could he...
Why We Need To Put Pizzazz in Impeachment (and Rebuild America’s Educational System)
Shortly after the world changed on November 8, 2016, one of my no-longer-friends enthusiastically declared that we finally had a president who was entertaining. I was horrified, for all the obvious reasons. But I also realized the harsh reality: this is how the world works. Entertainment now trumps, well, everything. The enthusiastic embrace of entertainment over evidence has complex reasons behind it. It is not just that the American educational system is deteriorating, although, of course,...
FIT Screening Series Fall 2019: Hail Satan? with director Penny Lane / Oct. 22nd @ 6:30PM
Chronicling the extraordinary rise of one of the most colorful and controversial religious movements in American history, Hail Satan? is an inspiring and entertaining new feature documentary from acclaimed director Penny Lane (Nuts!, Our Nixon). When media-savvy members of the Satanic Temple organize a series of public actions designed to advocate for religious freedom and challenge corrupt authority, they prove that with little more than a clever idea, a mischievous sense of humor, and a few...