Piyush Roy
Author, Poet, Filmmaker, Critic, Columnist and Educator
Former editor of popular film magazine, Stardust and film-weekly, StarWeek, he has worked at senior reporting positions in leading Indian dailies (The Indian Express, Hindustan Times) and has been published in The Times of India Crest Edition, The Asian Age, Society magazine, Screen and The New Indian Express, authoring over 500 media publications. He’s been the writer of two popular film columns, ‘Sunday Talkies’ with Orissa Post (2011-2018) and ‘Soul Cinema’ with The Times of India Speaking Tree (2018-) edition.
Author of two fiction works – Never Say Never Again (2007) and Alexander – An Epic Love Story (2007) and an online novel series, The Millennium Batch (2020); in 2019, he made his non-fiction and feature film debut with Bollywood FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About the Greatest Film Story Never Told (Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, USA), and a critically acclaimed documentary, Pleasures Prejudice & Pride: An Indian Way of Filmmaking. It was the first Indian documentary in the new millennium to be the focus of an exclusive multi-city global seminar screening tour, across seven universities in the United Kingdom in September-October 2019. His latest film, an experimental feature, Amrtah: The Author of Time (2020), is inspired by ideas, insights and learner-teacher interactions in The Upanishads.
He’s been a jury member of Power Brands-Bollywood Film Journalist’s Awards and has twice judged the Star Writers Program (2017, 2019) a talent hunt for television content writers organised by Star TV India Pvt. Ltd. A jury and advisory board member of the Global University Film Awards (Hong Kong 2018-onwards), he was the Founder-Festival Director of Edinburgh Festival of Indian Films & Documentaries (2016-17). In 2017, he made his public debut as a poet and photographer with a unique Pan-Indian photo-poetry exhibition experiment – ‘The Collector of Characters’ – on the theme of ‘70 years of the Indian independence’.
Teaching at higher education institutions in the UK and India (Indian Institute of Mass Communication Dhenkanal, Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, The Kohima Institute, MIDAS Pune, etc.) for a decade, his doctoral thesis was on ‘The Aesthetics of Emotional Acting: A Rasa based review of Indian cinema and television’ from the University of Edinburgh (2017). He has been Associate Professor (Film, Philosophy & Creative Industries) and Founding Team member of the School of Creative Liberal Education at Jain University, Bengaluru (2018-19) and Chief Learning Consultant at DALHAM Learning (launched 2020), a virtual knowledge platform offering Integrated Liberal Education programmes to higher education institutions. Presently, he is Dean and Professor (Film and Creative Industries), School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, RV University, Bengaluru and writes a column in The Hindu introducing landmark Indian film classics.