Project
People’s Archives of Indian Cinema (PPAIC)

The Project People Archive of Indian Cinema (PPAIC) is committed to sharing, building and making accessible hidden micro-archives of peoples on the rich heritage of Indian cinema. We believe in the power of people to become agents of heritage, irrespective of their backgrounds.

Narrative, storytelling, meaning-making, context providing – most of the archivists I know are already great at this and we know that it is what resonates most about archives for many people.

Kate Theimer, 2018: 15

Biographies of Our People

Prof Monia Acciari (PhD) is a Visiting Fellow, Ashoka University and Professor in Film and Television History at De Montfort University (Leicester, UK)

She teaches and researches Film Festivals, Film Archives, Global Indian Cinema History, digital storytelling and Film Heritage data. She is interested in notions of Film archaeology, citizen film heritage and her research intersect Indian film history with archival studies and more recently with digital humanities. Most of her teaching is informed by research-led practices, specifically pertaining to film curatorship, film archives (both tangible and intangible) and film material culture. She has recently co-edited along with Phillip Rhensious a book entitled The Politics of Curatorship, published by NORIENT Books (2023). She completed her Heritage Data training at Cambridge University and is FIAF-BAVASS trained in Digital archiving of cinema. Dr Acciari is associate director of the UK Asian Film Festival (Leicester Section) in the UK, Director of the Indian cinema Archive at De Montfort University. She has been principal investigator of a number of funded research projects in the UK. Dr Acciari has been Visiting Professor at The English and Foreign Languages University (2019), Ashoka University (2021) and international visiting faculty at the University of Pune (Liberal Arts, 2022) and IISER Pune (2022). Dr Acciari, is currently working on her monograph Fortuitous Archives of Indian Cinema Now on Record (Amsterdam University Press, 2027), editing a book Archivescapes of Indian cinema (Routledge 2026) and co-editing a special issue of the South Asian popular Culture Journal, alongside Dr Kaushik Bhaumik (JNU) on Archives and the Popular.