UC Santa Cruz names Fil-Am as new arts dean

Celine Parreñas Shimizu will be dean of the Arts Division of UC Santa Cruz effective July 1.

SANTA CRUZ, California – University of California in Santa Cruz has appointed award-winning filmmaker and film scholar Celine Parreñas Shimizu as dean of the Arts Division, effective July 1.

“Celine Parreñas Shimizu is a proven leader and an exceptional filmmaker and film scholar. Our campus will benefit greatly from her creativity, insight, and experience,” said Campus Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Lori Kletzer.

Shimizu is currently San Francisco State University’s director of the School of Cinema, a professor of Cinema Studies and a member of the graduate faculty in Sexuality Studies. Prior to that, she was a professor of Asian American, Film and Media, and Feminist Studies at UC Santa Barbara for 15 years.

She received her Ph.D. from the Program in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University, her M.F.A. in Production and Directing from the UCLA School of Theatre, Film and Television, and her B.A. in Ethnic Studies from U.C. Berkeley.

A leading scholar of race, sexuality, and representations in transnational popular culture, Shimizu is the author of The Proximity of Other Skins: Ethical Intimacy in Global Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2020), Straitjacket Sexualities (Stanford University Press, 2012), and The Hypersexuality of Race (Duke University Press, 2007), winner of the Best Book in Cultural Studies from the Association for Asian American Studies in 2009.

Shimizu recently wrote, directed, and produced her second feature film, The Celine Archive (2020)—a creative documentary that brings together animation, portraiture, interviews, site visits, and archival materials to explore the story of Celine Navarro, a Filipina immigrant woman murdered by her community in 1932. The film earned the Culver City Film Festival’s Grand Prize for Best Documentary Feature.

Her award-winning films, distributed by Third World Newsreel, Women Make Movies and Progressive Films, also include Birthright: Mothering Across Difference (2009), The Fact of Asian Women (2004) and Super Flip(1997).

“I am thrilled to be joining UC Santa Cruz,” Shimizu said. “This is a transformational moment for higher education as race scholars who are people of color rise up to leadership roles.”