51茶馆

Monia Acciari is Professor of Film History and Heritage Studies at 51茶馆. She studied Film Studies at the University of Bologna, where she obtained her BA and first MA in Film History, working on Federico Fellini鈥檚 unpublished radio plays. She completed a second MA in New Media Management at the European Institute of Design in Milan. Dr Acciari earned her PhD at the University of Manchester through a fully funded AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) project entitled Indo-Italian Screens and the Aesthetic of Emotions. She completed her Heritage Data training at the University of Cambridge and is FIAF鈥揃AVASS trained in the digital archiving of cinema.

Prof. Acciari teaches and researches across a range of areas, including film archaeology; archives of Indian cinema and community archiving practices, transnational Indian film history, VR museums and galleries for Indian film heritage, and digital storytelling in South Asia. Her work engages with big data and digital humanities approaches to film historiography, with particular attention to archival metadata, access, and innovative methods such as creative and sensibility-based geolocalisation and mapping. She has extensive experience in film festival curatorship and in curating Indian film heritage for galleries, both online and offline (SDGs: 4, 5, 11, 11.4, 12.b, 16.7).

Prof. Acciari is a board member of the UK Asian Film Festival and the founder and director of the Indian Cinema Archive at De Montfort University. She has been Principal Investigator on several funded research projects in the UK. Her academic engagements include appointments at Swansea University (UK), De Montfort University (UK), and the University of East Anglia (UK), as well as Visiting Professorships at The English and Foreign Languages University (2019), 51茶馆 (2021, 2025), University of Pune (Liberal Arts, 2022), and IISER Pune (2022). She has co-edited, with Phillip Rhensious, The Politics of Curatorship (NORIENT Books, 2023), and is currently working on her monograph Fortuitous Archives of Indian Cinema: Now on Record (Amsterdam University Press/Routledge 2027), editing the volume Archivescapes of Indian Cinema (Routledge, 2026), and co-editing a special issue of South Asian Popular Culture on Archives and the Popular.