Fields of Interest
Biography
Diana Flores Ruíz examines forms of mediation that produce and facilitate structures of racialized violence, as well as artistic and activist modes of visual resistance. Her current book project investigates the technological construction of the US-Mexico border through the lenses of apprehension, as well as creative remediations against the border's carceral visuality. Spanning from its cartographic founding to its current virtual, biometric capacity, Dr. Ruíz analyzes a constellation of photography, cinema, surveillance, and machine vision to demonstrate how visual cultures of the border constitute differential racial emplacements of mobility and itinerant political subjectivities.
Her writing appears in Feminist Film Histories, Critical Ethnic Studies, the Journal of Cinema & Media Studies, Film Quarterly, Temporal Territories: An Anthology on Indigenous Experimental Cinema (Cousin Collective and Light Industry, 2024), and The Matter of Photography in the Americas (Stanford UP, 2018), among other venues.
Recent invited talks include a roundtable on ecofascist aesthetics at Pitzer College (2026), a Digital Humanities and Social Engagement talk at Dartmouth College (2025), and a virtual presentation for the University of Alberta's symposium on Mediating Racial Capitalism (2024). She has offered keynote addresses for the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S) (2025), the Media Fields Research Collective Conference on Witnessing (2025), the UW CMS Graduate Conference (2024), and the University of Pittsburgh Film & Media Studies Graduate Conference (2023).
Dr. Ruíz is a 2025-2026 Mellon Career Enhancement Fellow. Her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation (US Latino Digital Humanities Grant-in-Aid; Mellon Mays Dissertation Fellowship), the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities (Society of Fellows, Digital Humanities Fellowships), the Social Science Research Council, and the UC Berkeley Center for Latin American Studies, as well as other internal academic institutional grants.
Research
Selected Research
- Diana Flores Ruíz, “Swamp Slop and Fake Moats: On the AI Mediation of Alligator Alcatraz” Flow: A Critical Forum on Media and Culture 32, no 2, December 1, 2025
- Ruíz, Diana Flores. "Split Rein or Whip? On the Production of Infrastructural Integrity at the US-Mexico Border." JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 65, no. 1 (2025): 162-168. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cj.2025.a973995.
- Mal Ahern and Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, eds, In Focus: Images and (Infra)structures, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 65, no. 1 (Fall 2025), 156-201. Download PDF
- “Desire Lines: Sky Hopinka’s Undisciplining of Vision,” Reproduced in Temporal Territories: An Anthology on Indigenous Experimental Cinema, Cousin Collective and Light Industry Press, November 2024
- Diana Flores Ruíz; Review: Border Tunnels: A Media Theory of the U.S.–Mexico Underground, by Juan Llamas-Rodriguez. Film Quarterly 1 June 2024; 77 (4): 103–104. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2024.77.4.103
- Diana Flores Ruíz; Rematerialization: Anticolonial Collective Memory through Latinx Digital Art. Feminist Media Histories 1 October 2024; 10 (4): 10–31. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2024.10.4.10
- Ruíz, Diana Flores. "Reference Rot: Digital Decay, White Supremacy, and Endangering Data." JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 63, no. 3 (2024): 190-196. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cj.2024.a927695.
- Llamas-Rodriguez, Juan. "Spotlight: Diana Flores Ruíz." JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 62, no. 4 (2023): 5-8. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cj.2023.a904624.
- Ruíz, Diana Flores. “Object Lessons: Humanitarian and Vigilante Imaging of Migrants’ Belongings along the U.S.–Mexico Border.” Critical Ethnic Studies 8, no. 2 (2023). https://www.jstor.org/stable/48849571.
- Diana Flores Ruíz, “Visiting: Towards Ethical Forms of Encounters,” in The sun comes in whenever it wants (Paris: Empire Books and Luma Arles, 2022)
- Diana Flores Ruíz; Desire Lines: Sky Hopinka’s Undisciplining of Vision. Film Quarterly 1 March 2022; 75 (3): 12–25. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2022.75.3.12