Celine Parreñas Shimizu

Her sole-authored books include The Proximity of Other Skins: Ethical Intimacy in Global Cinemas (Oxford University Press, 2020), 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, Concentric, 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 FLOWTV.org in 2009 and blogger on the They're All So Beautiful web series in 2013.

Her first feature film Birthright: Mothering Across Difference (2009) won the Best Feature Documentary at the Big Mini DV Festival. Her previous filmworks include Mahal Means Love and Expensive (1993), Her Uprooting Plants Her (1995), Super Flip (1997) and The Fact of Asian Women (2002/4), which won four festival awards. Her new film is The Celine Archive (2020), fiscally sponsored by Visual Communications in Los Angeles, is distributed by Women Make Movies and has won several festival awards.

As a faculty member, Shimizu's service and professional activity includes 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.

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.

Celine Parreñas Shimizu (born December 28, 1969) is a filmmaker and film scholar. She is well known for her work on race, sexuality and representations. She is currently Dean of the Arts Division at the University of California at Santa Cruz.