Diana Flores Ruíz

Diana Flores Ruíz is a feminist media scholar researching the sociotechnical media infrastructures of the US-Mexico border. Her approach encompasses a broad constellation of media objects produced by the state, information and defense technology companies, popular culture, activists, and independent artists of color. From these sources, she weaves cultural and historical analyses that detail the media ecologies shaping the mobilities, capture, and creative resistance of historically exploited border communities and people on the move. By bridging studies of carceral optics and liberatory visual practices, her work situates readings of emergent forms of data capture and digital incarceration within a longer historical continuum of settler colonial visual regimes and community-based resistance.

Her book manuscript, “Apprehension through Representation: Image Capture of the US-Mexico Border ” analyzes the historical role of optical border technologies in projects of anti-immigrant violence, how militarized visual regimes play out in popular visual culture, and the ways in which Latinx, Indigenous, Black, and Asian-American artists mobilize anticarceral media strategies. Dr. Ruíz’s writing appears or is forthcoming in Critical Ethnic Studies, Feminist Media Histories, Film Quarterly, The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, The Matter of Photography in the Americas (Stanford UP, 2018), The sun comes in whenever it wants: Sky Hopinka (LUMA Arts, 2022), Indigenous Experimental Cinema (Light Industry, 2024), and a forthcoming anthology on materiality and performance in the built environments of Mexico City (UAM Cuajimalpa). Her research has been funded by UW’s Simpson Center for the Humanities, UW’s Royalty Research Fund, the US Latino Digital Humanities Center at the University of Houston, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation), the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and UC Berkeley’s Center for Latin American Studies.

Dr. Ruíz earned her PhD and MA in Film & Media Studies from the University of California, Berkeley and her BA in Women’s Studies from Duke University as a Mellon Mays Fellow.