Dahlia Schweitzer

Schweitzer has taught at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising and the Art Center College of Design since 2008. In 2013, the LA Weekly described Schweitzer as one of the ten hottest professors in Los Angeles. An interest in visual communication brought her to UCLA's School of Theater, Film and Television to pursue a doctorate in Cinema and Media Studies in 2013.

An examination of exotic dance as a postmodern spectacle, Schweitzer's article, "Striptease: The Art of Spectacle and Transgression," was published in The Journal of Popular Culture in June 2000. This article would inspire a dance performance choreographed by dancer and performance artist Pere Faura. Examinations of sexuality, gender, and identity would also surface in her article "Who is Missing in Bunny Lake?", published in Jump Cut, as well as in her article “The Mindy Project: Or Why ‘I’m The Mary, You’re The Rhoda’ Is the RomComSitCom’s Most Revealing Accusation,” published in the Journal of Popular Film and Television.

Schweitzer's first major monograph, Cindy Sherman's Office Killer: Another Kind of Monster, was published in 2014. The book is the only publication devoted to this little known film. Schweitzer explores the film on a variety of levels, combating head-on the art world’s reluctance to discuss the movie and arguing instead that it is only through a close reading of the film that the messages underlying all of Sherman’s work can be appreciated. Deborah Jermyn describes Another Kind of Monster as "an astute but always accessible guide through the film itself and the multiple relevant critical contexts [Schweitzer] points to incisively as informing it." Jermyn also writes that Schweitzer "takes Office Killer’s strangeness and relative obscurity and painstakingly unpacks them, in the process escorting her readers on a tour that takes in Sherman’s oeuvre as one of the most celebrated photographers of our times, the matrix of cinema/Hollywood/genre, and the industrial, social and political landscape of late 1990s America." Isla Kapasi describes the book "as a call to all (feminist) researchers to continue to examine and re-examine the current and prevailing 'genres' in our societies and call them into question."

In 2016, the Quarterly Review of Film and Video published Schweitzer's article “Having a Moment and a Dream: Precious, Paris is Burning, and the Necessity of Fantasy in Everyday Life." Arguing against popular critics’ assertions that Precious is simply a negative representation of the black family, this essay posits that readers look at how formal aspects of fantasy operate through a discussion of Paris Is Burning. In particular, the juxtaposition of the two films reveals the artistic forms of survival and recovery that can emerge as a result of trauma, and their importance to the creative process.

Schweitzer's next focus would be depictions of pandemics and outbreak narratives in contemporary American film and television. Her first published essay on this topic, entitled "Going Viral in a World Gone Global: How Contagion Reinvents the Outbreak Narrative," was included in the anthology The Last Midnight: Essays on Apocalyptic Narratives in Millennial Media. Her article "When Terrorism Met the Plague: How 9/11 Affected the Outbreak Narrative" appeared in the Fall 2016 issue of Cinema Journal. Schweitzer's upcoming book, Going Viral: Zombies, Viruses, and the End of the World, explores depictions of pandemics and outbreak narratives in contemporary American film and television, putting them in conversation with rhetoric from government authorities and news organizations that have capitalized on public fears about our changing world.

Prior to moving to Berlin, Schweitzer sang and played bass and keyboards in the New York-based electro-punk band Galvanized. Described by Bella Todd as a "beat-driven blend of disco and new-wave," the band would produce two albums with producer Gordon Raphael. Prompted by a lack of community among female bands in New York, Schweitzer also organized Rockerchick, a monthly night at East Village bar Manitoba's devoted to providing local girl bands with an opportunity to connect and gain exposure. As an electro cabaret performer, Schweitzer was described as "one of the electro-queens of Berlin." As a solo performance artist in Europe, she performed in elaborate costumes in front of video projections to music that she created in collaboration with producers in Montreal and Paris. Schweitzer also organized various events inspired by the cabaret of 1930s Berlin.

In an interview entitled "A Conversation with Dahlia Schweitzer About Performance, Femininity, Berlin, East Village, Fiction," Dahlia Schweitzer was interviewed by Toby Miller for his Cultural Studies podcast. Schweitzer was also interviewed for the Berliner Morgenpost by Gunnar Luetzow.