About me
Xavier Alexandre Pillai is a curator, writer, film programmer, filmmaker and photographer. He is the TV programmer at the British Film Institute, where he leads the broadcaster-and-streamer preview strand. He co-curates the BFI National Archive project State of Emergence: The Films of the Black and South Asian workshops and curated the TV season Constructed, Told, Spoken: A counter history of Britain on TV at the BFI Southbank in March 2026. He is a former trustee at LUX Moving Image. As an independent writer and curator, he focuses his research on Caribbean histories and issues of restitution in film; his chapter on Institutional Memory and Return is forthcoming in Restitution and the Moving Image: Decolonising Global Film Heritage (Taylor & Francis, 2026). As a filmmaker and photographer, he uses film to reconcile political histories of place with the present. His photography is currently featured in a show at the Tate Britain as part of the ArtNow programme “our generous mother”.
