Dr. Nicolas Pillai is Assistant Professor of Creative and Critical Practice, based in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin. In 2017, he received a Research Leadership Fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council for his project ‘Jazz on BBC-TV 1960-1969.’ Based on his work, the BBC Four programme Jazz 625 Live went on to win Best Music Programme at the Broadcast Awards 2020.

Pillai is the author of Jazz as Visual Language: Film, Television and the Dissonant Image (2016, I. B. Tauris), co-edits the biannual peer-reviewed Jazz Research Journal and is currently developing the collection Rethinking Miles Davis for Oxford University Press. For the British Film Institute and Arrow Films, he has written essays for Blu-Ray releases of films by Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Jacques Demy, Barbra Streisand, Karel Reisz and Sidney Lumet. He also writes the ongoing Instagram comic strip Greyscale.