About

Michelle Dizon is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at UC Riverside.

Dizon’s recent projects include Gaza Before the Law, a film about failure of the US legal system in matters of justice for Palestine, The Archive’s Fold, a multi-image slide installation that explores the violence of the US colonial archive by reading its images through seven generations of women in Dizon’s family, and White Gaze (with Viet Le), an artist’s book and photographic installation that poses a decolonial counterpoint to National Geographic and its legacy of imperialist visuality.  Past projects of note include Perpetual Peace, a multichannel video installation about extractivism and ecological disaster in the Philippines,  Basing Landscapes, a single-channel video installation about the gendered violence of US neocolonial occupation, and Civil Society, a three-channel video installation that considers cultural memory through the lens of two events: the 2005 uprisings in the French banlieues and the 1992 uprisings in Los Angeles.

Dizon’s work takes place in both the contexts of institutions and grassroots organizing. She has lectured and exhibited across the Americas, Europe, and Asia in significant cultural and educational institutions such as the Center for Feminist Studies in Zagreb, Croatia, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, UK, SalaSab, Bogota, Colombia, Caixaforum, Barcelona, Spain, Jeu de Paume, Paris, France, The Cooper Union, NYC, NY, Vargas Museum, Manila, Philippines, Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong, the Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, Gothenburg, Sweden, and the Singapore Biennial.  She has also founded and developed grassroots initiatives to build and nurture community such as at land’s edge (2015-18) an autonomous pedagogical platform based in South and East Los Angeles and the Memory and Resistance Laboratory (2019- present) which partners with grassroots organization to create media based in political struggle and social movements.  Dizon has received grants from the University of California Humanities Research, the Human Rights Center, Art Matters, the Fulbright Foundation.  She has been honored with a 2017-18 Master Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles.

She earned an MFA in Art with a specialization in Interdisciplinary Studio from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Ph.D. in Rhetoric with designated emphases in Film and Women, Gender, and Sexuality from the University of California, Berkeley.