Díaz, Vanessa

Vanessa Díaz

Los Angeles, California, United States

Assistant Professor of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies; Loyola Marymount University

Biography

Vanessa Díaz is a multimedia ethnographer and journalist whose work focuses on issues of race, gender, and labor in popular culture across the Americas. Grounded in her experience as a red carpet reporter for People magazine, Díaz’s first book Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood focuses on hierarchies of labor as well as racial and gender politics in the production of celebrity-focused media. Díaz is a co-author of UCLA’s 2017 Hollywood Diversity Report, director of the film Cuban HipHop: Desde el Principio, and the media editor for Transforming Anthropology. Her research has been profiled in such outlets as the Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, and NBC News. Díaz is an assistant professor in the Department of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at Loyola Marymount University.

Scholarly beginnings

A research idea

Envisioning possible futures in the field of communication and media studies

Learn more about Prof. Díaz’s journey

Selected readings

• Díaz, V. (2020). Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood. Durham: Duke University Press.

• Díaz, V. (2020). Performative Wokeness/White Victimhood: The Hypocrisy of Celebrity Villainization of Paparazzi. Women’s Studies in Communication, 43(4), 363-368.

• Cintrón-Moscoso, F., & Díaz, V. (2020). Photo essay: The power of popular protest: El Verano Boricua. Latin American Perspectives, 47(3), 13-17.

• Rosa, J., & Díaz, V. (2020). Raciontologies: Rethinking anthropological accounts of institutional racism and enactments of White supremacy in the United States. American Anthropologist, 122(1), 120-132.

• Hunt, D. M., Ramón, A. C., Tran, M., Sargent, A., & Díaz, V. (2017). Hollywood diversity report: Setting the record straight. Los Angeles: Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA.