Celine Parreñas Shimizu, film scholar and filmmaker, is Dean of the Division of Arts and Distinguished Professor of Film and Digital 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 where she was Chair of the Senior Women’s Council. She was also a Visiting Professor in Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz in 2013.
Sole-authored 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 (Duke, 2007) which won Best Book in Cultural Studies from the Association for Asian American Studies in 2009. She co-edited The Feminist Porn Book (The Feminist Press, 2013) and The Unwatchability of Whiteness (Brill, 2018).
Her recent films The Celine Archive (2020), won several festival awards and 80 Years Later: On Japanese American Racial Inheritance (2022) screened at 50 film festivals and won 15 awards for best historical documentary or excellence in directing awards. Both are distributed by Women Make Movies.
She has served as a reviewer for the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. 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 research and creative activity have received support from the Motion Picture Association of America, the Social Science Research Council, the James Pendleton Foundation, and the Edie and Lew Wasserman Fund. She has additionally received 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. In 2022-23, she won the Excellence in Mentorship Award from the Association for Asian American Studies.
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.