From the Desk of Dean Celine Parreñas Shimizu

Celine Parreñas Shimizu is Dean of Theater, Film and Television and Distinguished Professor of Film, Television and Digital Media at UCLA. A premier scholar of race and sexuality in representation, her books include The Movies of Racial Childhoods (Duke, 2024), The Proximity of Other Skins (Oxford, 2020), Straitjacket Sexualities (Stanford, 2012), and The Hypersexuality of Race (2007) which won Best Book in Cultural Studies from the Association for Asian American Studies which also awarded her the 2022 Excellence in Mentorship Award. Her peer-reviewed articles appear in top journals in cinema, performance, ethnic, feminist, sexuality studies, and transnational popular culture. Her writings are translated to French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. Distributed by Women Make Movies, her films The Celine Archive (2020) and 80 Years Later: On Japanese American Racial Inheritance (2022) each won several festival awards. Her latest So To Speak (2025) is on the festival circuit. She received her Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University (which inducted her into its Multicultural Alumni Hall of Fame in 2023), 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 U.C. Berkeley.