Veronica Paredes is a media and cultural studies scholar. Her research interests include feminist research and pedagogical praxis, and the intersections between Latinx media studies and Los Angeles historiography, especially related to the city’s vintage movie theaters and its designated screen landmarks. She has written about the role of former movie palaces as churches, filmic representations of the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles, and her experiences with feminist media-based organizing. Individually written work has been published in Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, Feminist Media Histories, and Amodern, and work she has collaboratively written was published in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. She is working on a book manuscript about LA’s Historic Theater District titled Surviving Cinema: Race, Hollywood Heritage, and Nostalgia in Downtown Los Angeles. While vintage movie palaces dot downtown districts across the United States, the largest gathering of surviving theaters built before the Second World War remain standing only in downtown Los Angeles. Surviving Cinema examines how images of Los Angeles’s past are constructed from this historically significant entertainment locale, both in stories told by film history enthusiasts and in popular filmic depictions that use LA’s Broadway as a background.
She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Film, Television and Digital Media at the University of California, Los Angeles, and holds a PhD from the Media Arts + Practice program at the University of Southern California.