Her sole-authored books include The Proximity of Other Skins: Ethical Intimacy in Global Cinemas (Oxford University Press, 2020), Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies The book examines transnational films and their representations of intimacy across radical inequality.
[4] The book studies scenes of cinematic intimacy in the forging of ethical manhoods on and off screen for Asian American men.
In it, she analyzes hypersexual representations of Asian American women in various media including industry and independent film, pornography and feminist video.
Her previous filmworks include Mahal Means Love and Expensive (1993), Her Uprooting Plants Her (1995), Super Flip (1997) and The Fact of Asian Women (2002/4), which won four festival awards.
Her new film is The Celine Archive (2020), fiscally sponsored by Visual Communications in Los Angeles, is distributed by Women Make Movies and has won several festival awards.
For her scholarship and film work, Dr. Parreñas Shimizu has received many additional awards, fellowships, grants and honors including the Social Science Research Council Sexuality Research Fellowship, the Stanford Asian American Studies Graduate Academic Award, the Edie and Lew Wasserman Directing Fellowship at UCLA, the James Pendleton Foundation Directing Prize at UCLA and the Eisner Prize for Poetry—UC Berkeley's highest award in the creative arts.
At UCLA School of Theatre, Film and Television, she was founding president of the student body.