I am a moving image curator, cultural practitioner and teacher working across film and visual arts. Throughout my career, I have actively sought to combine academic work and teaching with my practice as a curator, distributor and film access specialist, as I strongly believe that one informs the other.

My curatorial practice is focused on independent Japanese, Southeast Asian, Himalayan and regional Indian cinemas and artists’ moving image, incorporating curatorial design and production for theme-based, touring and film festival programmes. My work in distribution has been largely focused on Asian cinema, particularly work by emerging and new cinematic voices that seek to critically reflect on the possibilities of cinema.

My PhD centred on French actor Jean-Pierre Léaud. Using the theoretical approach of star studies, my thesis explored how the concept of the “star” is constructed through audience perception and identification, examining the on and off-screen star persona of an iconic figure of the French New Wave and beyond and the sites of contradiction that give rise to ambiguity around his star image, contextualised within the socio-political climate of May 1968 and its aftermath in particular.

Since completing my PhD, I have continued to work on French cinema, particularly on filmmakers François Truffaut and Jean Eustache, publishing articles and presenting papers at various French and Film Studies conferences. I was recently invited to give a series of public talks as part of the British Film Institute season “François Truffaut: For the Love of Films”.

My research interests also cover cinema and architecture, the intersection between sound, image and text in relation to translation and language transfer on screen, and drawing from my curatorial practice, film festivals and distribution, particularly in relation to small national film industries and filmmaking collectives. I regularly contribute to various MA film curating and film studies programmes at UK universities on these topics.

I have taught on BA and MA Film Studies and Film Distribution courses as a sessional lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University and Birmingham City University, a guest lecturer on Film Curating and Film Distribution MA modules at National Film and Television School, Birkbeck, and in Screen Translation at UCL, University of Essex, Roehampton University. I have also been an MA dissertation mentor for students at London Film School for the MA International Film Business course and at UCL for the MA Creative and Collaborative Enterprise course. I have presented my PhD research at University of Glasgow and Institut De l’histore de l’art in Paris. Most recently, I was appointed MA Film Studies, Programming & Curation Industry Reviewer at National Film and Television School for which I am required to provide industry based assessments on all students

More recently, I have fostered an interest in cultural activism and approaches to labour in the creative industries, particularly in relation to shifting working practices in the film industry. I have been invited to participate in various related projects and to co-author a forthcoming research paper on this subject.

Over the course of my career, I have drawn together the different strands of my work through a commitment to championing diversity and inclusion in film culture and the arts, with a strong emphasis on audiences and accessibility. More broadly, my work seeks to expand access to independent cinema and artists’ film, particularly underrepresented and under acknowledged areas of moving image culture.