Dr Piyush Roy is an Indian National Film Award winning critic-columnist, and an international author, curator, filmmaker and professor in film studies. 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.

Honoured with “Special Mention” for Best Critic at the 60th Indian National Film Awards (2013) by the President of India, Pranab Mukherjee, he was invited by Queen Elizabeth II and The Duke of Edinburgh to the UK-India Year of Culture’s official inauguration at the Buckingham Palace on 27 February 2017 featuring eminent Indians from the nation’s civil society, politics, sports, arts and culture. He was also conferred the Sir William Darling Memorial Prize (Sept. 2014) by the Principal, University of Edinburgh ‘for advancing and enhancing the reputation of the University through his conduct, example and scholarship’.

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). His last full-time academic engagement was as Associate Professor (in Liberal Education/ Film, Philosophy & Creative Industries) and Founding Team member of the School of Creative Liberal Education at Jain University, Bengaluru (2018-19).

Presently, he is Chief Learning Consultant at DALHAM Learning, a virtual knowledge platform offering Integrated Liberal Education programmes to higher education institutions, and is directing an experimental feature film inspired by the ideas, insights and learner-teacher interactions in The Upanishads.