Curator, television
Xavier Alexandre Pillai is assistant curator for the Heritage 2022 programme, and works as part of the Archive Projects team, developing content for the forthcoming BFI Replay platform. He joined the BFI in 2018 as a trainee, sponsored by ICON, initially working in the video conservation team, where he worked to preserve legacy formats, and subsequently in other departments within the National Archive, including the curatorial team. His current post is sponsored by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation.
His interests lie in multicultural television, government communications, documentary films, and pre-independence colonial films. Since joining the curatorial team, Xavier has worked across a number of collections, including Video Nation and the Central Office of Information film collections. He programmed From the Caribbean to West Africa: Edric Connor’s Travelogues for the 2021 London Film Festival and has worked as a programmer for the Trinidad and Tobago film festival in 2021.
Xavier is a graduate of the National Film and Television School and McGill University.