Celine Parreñas Shimizu


Celine Parreñas Shimizu is an award-winning filmmaker and film scholar. She is well known for her work on race, sexuality and representations and is currently a Professor of Cinema.

Background

Shimizu is the daughter of political refugees from the Philippines. Her family relocated to Boston when she was in her early teens. She attended the University of California at Berkeley and received a B.A. in Ethnic Studies in 1992. She has an M.F.A. in Film Directing and Production from the University of California at Los Angeles and a Ph.D. from Stanford University in Modern Thought and Literature. She is married to Daniel P Shimizu with whom she has two sons. She is a grieving mother whose youngest son Lakas suddenly died in 2013 from a common virus that attacked his heart within 24 hours.

Career

Shimizu is a Professor of Cinema at the School of Cinema in San Francisco State University and for fifteen years, was Professor of Film and Performance Studies in the Asian American, Comparative Literature, Feminist, and Film and Media Studies Departments at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She is well known for her work on race, sexuality and representations.
Her sole-authored books include The Proximity of Other Skins: Ethical Intimacy in Global Cinemas, Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies The book examines transnational films and their representations of intimacy across radical inequality. The book studies scenes of cinematic intimacy in the forging of ethical manhoods on and off screen for Asian American men. Her first book The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene won the Cultural Studies Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies. In it, she analyzes hypersexual representations of Asian American women in various media including industry and independent film, pornography and feminist video. She edited the book The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure along with Constance Penley, Mireille Miller-Young, and Tristan Taormino.
Shimizu's numerous publications include interviews and articles in the top journals in her fields including Cinema Journal,, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Wide Angle, Theatre Journal, Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, Journal of Asian American Studies and Sexualities. She served as a columnist for the new media journal in 2009 and blogger on the web series in 2013.
Her first feature film ' won the Best Feature Documentary at the Big Mini DV Festival. Her previous filmworks include ', ', ' and , which won four festival awards. Her new film is The Celine Archive which is fiscally sponsored by Visual Communications in Los Angeles.
She teaches popular culture, social theories of power and inequality, race and sexuality, feminist and film and performance theory as well as production.
For her scholarship and film work, Dr. Parreñas Shimizu has received many additional awards, fellowships, grants and honors including the , the Stanford Asian American Studies Graduate Academic Award, the Edie and Lew Wasserman Directing Fellowship at UCLA, the James Pendleton Foundation Directing Prize at UCLA and the Eisner Prize for Poetry—UC Berkeley's highest award in the creative arts. She has received external faculty fellowships from the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney and the Research Institute for Comparative Study in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University.
While at the University of California at Berkeley, she founded "smell this", the magazine by and about women of color distributed by Third Woman Press and edited "Tea Leaves," the Asian American arts and literary magazine as well as the undergraduate journal "portfolio." At UCLA School of Theatre, Film and Television, she was founding president of the student body.
As a faculty member, Shimizu's service and professional activity includes Directorship of the School of Cinema at SFSU beginning in the Fall of 2019 and the current Associate Directorship, Chair of the Retention, Promotion and Tenure Committee at SFSU CINE in 2018–present, and the leadership of the UCSB Senior Women's Council in 2007–09, and serving on the board of the University of California Committee on Academic Freedom, the UCSB Committee on Faculty Issues and Awards, UCSB Women's Center, the UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and the UCSB Center for Interdisciplinary Study of Music as well as serving as a jury member for the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival and the Social Justice Award for Documentary at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. She convened the inaugural formation of the New Sexualities research focus group at UCSB. And she co-chaired the Asian Pacific Caucus for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in 2008–10.
On a national level, she has served as a reviewer for the Ford Foundation Diversity Fellowships and the National Endowment for the Humanities' America's Media Makers Program. For Duke University Press, New York University, Oxford University Press, Rutgers University, Temple University, University of Michigan Presses, and journals such as Signs, , and Frontiers she reviews articles and books.
She has served as Associate Editor for Women's International Forum, USA Editor for Asian Diasporas and Visual Cultures of the Americas and is currently Associate Editor for GLQ.
Professor Shimizu advises undergraduate and graduate students in a wide variety of disciplines as well as interdisciplinary areas of inquiry at SFSU and beyond.

Publications

Sole-authored books

Los Angeles Asian American Film Festival, Chicago Asian American Film Festival, Women in the Directors’ Chair International Film Festival in Chicago, Directors’ Guild of America, Arkipelago-NYU Film Festival, New York International Film and Video Festival, Memories of Overdevelopment – U.S., Canada and Latin America, Japanese American Cultural Center in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Los Angeles Filipino Film Festivals, Society for Cinema Studies, Kansas, SF Cinematheque, San Francisco Asian American International Festival, and Plug-In Gallery, Canada, Smithsonian Institution, Los Angeles Asian American Film Festival, Japanese American Cultural Center in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles Filipino Film Festivals; Japanese American Cultural Center in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Los Angeles Filipino Film Festivals, Society for Cinema Studies, Kansas, Long Island Festival in New York, San Francisco International Film Festival, Philippine Consulate – New York.

Film collections

Georgetown University, University of Michigan, University of Massachusetts at Boston; University of Vermont; Temple University, San Francisco State University; Asian CineVision; Visual Communications; Film Arts Foundation; NAATA; University of Hawaii; University of Wisconsin at Madison; Stanford University; Santa Clara University; Northwestern University; Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada; and University of California Berkeley, Davis, Riverside, Los Angeles, and Santa Barbara.

Other publications, radio and TV documentaries