Daniela Baroffio, PhD, is a clinical professor of communication at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism whose work examines the relationship between media, culture and power. Her teaching and scholarship focus on gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, feminism, representation, popular culture, entertainment and social change, with particular attention to the ways media make some identities, experiences and systems of power appear natural or universal — and the ways media can also expose, contest and transform them.

Baroffio’s teaching brings foundational communication, cultural and feminist scholarship into conversation with the world students are living in now. Across courses in gender and media, entertainment and popular culture, and media and social change, she explores questions of representation, inequality, democracy, digital culture, artificial intelligence and media ethics. Her approach is deliberately interdisciplinary and contemporary, using current events, emerging technologies, documentaries, popular media and cultural debates to examine how communication both reflects and shapes social life. Her classroom philosophy combines intellectual rigor with openness: students are encouraged to question assumptions, engage difficult ideas, encounter perspectives different from their own, and understand how power operates through media and culture.

From 2018 to 2026, Baroffio served as director of USC Annenberg’s MS in Digital Social Media program. During eight years of leadership, she oversaw curriculum, admissions, faculty coordination, academic standards, assessment, recruitment, enrollment and student support while helping the program respond to a rapidly changing digital media environment. Her leadership was grounded in the same principles that shape her teaching: equity, fairness, academic rigor and an insistence on seeing students as individuals rather than numbers within an institution.

Mentorship is central to Baroffio’s work at USC. She works closely with undergraduate and graduate students on their academic and professional development and is particularly committed to students navigating difficulty, uncertainty, or institutional barriers. She approaches teaching and mentorship as connected practices: maintaining high academic expectations while creating a classroom in which students can disagree, take intellectual risks, ask for help, and know that they belong. Her students have described her courses as current, discussion-driven, intellectually challenging and connected to events “as they happen in real time” — a reflection of her commitment to making communication scholarship meaningful beyond the classroom.

Baroffio earned her PhD from USC Annenberg in 2006. Her doctoral research examined gender, militarism and mediated representations of the female soldier in the post-9/11 United States. That early work on gender, representation and institutional power continues to inform a broader intellectual project concerned with whose voices are heard, whose experiences become culturally visible, and how media participate in the production — and disruption — of inequality.