December 10, 2024

CELINE PARREÑAS SHIMIZU
M.F.A., Ph.D.

Dean · Distinguished Professor · Scholar · Filmmaker


Biography

Celine Parreñas Shimizu, film scholar and filmmaker, is Dean of the Division of the Arts and Distinguished Professor of Film and Media at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She is formerly Professor and Director of the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University and Professor of Asian American, Feminist and Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara.

She wrote The Proximity of Other Skins (2020), Straitjacket Sexualities (2012), and The Hypersexuality of Race (2007) and co-edited The Feminist Porn Book (2013) and The Unwatchability of Whiteness (2018). Her new book The Movies of Racial Childhoods: Screening Self-Sovereignty in Asian / America, is forthcoming from Duke University Press.

Her numerous peer-reviewed articles appear in top journals in the fields of cinema, performance, ethnic, feminist, sexuality studies, and transnational popular culture in Asia and Asian America. She is formerly Associate Editor of Gay and Lesbian Quarterly (GLQ), founding USA editor of Asian Diasporas and Visual Cultures of the Americas and Associate Editor of Women Studies International Forum.

Her latest film 80 Years Later (2022) screened in over 50 film festivals and won 15 awards including for best historical documentary and excellence in directing. Her previous film The Celine Archive (2020) won several festival awards and both are distributed by Women Make Movies and available on demand via wmm.com

She has served as a reviewer for the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and as a reviewer for the Ford Foundation, the National Academies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

She received her Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University, her M.F.A. in Film Directing and Production from UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television and her B.A. in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley.  

Photograph by Carolyn Lagattuta