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 Professor , Ashoka University and Professor in Film and Television History at De Montfort University (Leicester, UK)

She studied Film Studies at the University of Bologna, where she obtained her BA and first MA in Film History, working on Federico Fellini’s unpublished radio plays.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–BAVASS 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), Ashoka University (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.