Celine Parreñas Shimizu

Celine Parreñas Shimizu is Dean of Theater, Film and Television and Distinguished Professor of Film, Television and Digital Media at UCLA.

She is well-known for her work on race, sexuality and representations. She wrote The Movies of Racial Childhoods (Duke, 2024), The Proximity of Other Skins (Oxford, 2020), Straitjacket Sexualities (Stanford, 2012), and The Hypersexuality of Race (Duke, 2007) which won Best Book in Cultural Studies from the Association for Asian American 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 experimental narrative and fiction films. Her films 80 Years Later: On Japanese American Racial Inheritance (2022) screened at over 50 film festivals and won 20 awards, and The Celine Archive (2020) screened at over 20 film festivals and won 10 awards for best historical documentary and excellence in directing from various festivals. Both are distributed by the Women Make Movies (www.wmm.com). Her latest So To Speak (2025) is on the festival circuit.

In recent years, she won the Mentorship Award from the Association for Asian American Studies (2022) and was inducted into the Stanford University Multicultural Alumni Hall of Fame (2023).

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 U.C. Berkeley. For more, go to www.celineshimizu.com.