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, sexuality, and representation, Celine has authored and edited numerous books and scholarly journals, including The Movies of Racial Childhoods(Duke, 2024), which won the 2026 Association for Asian American Studies top prize in Media, Performance and Film, and The Hypersexuality of Race (Duke, 2007), which won the Association’s Best Book in Cultural Studies.
She co-edited The Feminist Porn Book (The Feminist Press, 2012) and The Unwatchability of Whiteness (ADVA Brill 2018). She served as Associate Editor of GLQ and Women Studies International Forum as well as founding USA Editor of Asian Diasporas and Visual Cultures. Her numerous peer-reviewed articles are published in the top journals in her field. Her research received funding from the Social Science Research Council and the Takahashi Foundation and fellowships from the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney and the Research Institute for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University. Her writings have been translated to French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.
An ethnographer and historian of images, she makes films like 80 Years Later: On Japanese American Racial Inheritance (2022) screened at over 50 festivals, won 20 awards, and currently on PBS; The Celine Archive (2020) screened at over 20 festivals and won 10 awards, including best historical documentary and excellence in directing. Both are distributed by Women Make Movies. Her latest film, So To Speak (2025), is winning awards on the festival circuit.
She received the Association for Asian American Studies Mentorship Award in 2022 , a distinguished alumna award from Stanford. which who also inducted her into its Alumni Hall of Fame in 2023. She holds a Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford, an M.F.A. in Film Directing and Production from UCLA, and a B.A. in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley. For more, visit www.celineshimizu.com.
Executive Board details
- Board profile title: Dean and Distinguished Professor
Roles and teams
- TFT Leadership: Distinguished Professor Dean, School of Theater, Film and Television
- TFT Faculty Executive Committee: Ex-Officio Member