Imran Firdaus

Imran Firdaus is a scholar, filmmaker, and cultural strategist working across moving-image practice, creative economy policy, and film theory. He is an Assistant Professor and Head of the Department of Media and Communication at Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB), and a 2025 Charles Wallace Bangladesh Trust Research Fellow at the SOAS South Asia Institute, University of London. He holds a PhD in Film Studies and Screen Production from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), and works on transgressive cinema, screenwriting labour, and digital governance. 

His doctoral thesis, The Cinema of Gaspar Noé: A Poetics of Transgression (2023), sits alongside a forthcoming essay for Umbrella Entertainment (Irréversible À la mode: The Fabric of Haute Horreur) and peer-reviewed work in journals including Iluminace, Senses of Cinema, and Asian Movie Pulse. In South Asia's creative industries, Dr. Firdaus leads major state and international policy initiatives. He is Principal Investigator for the British Council-commissioned Cinema as a Creative Industry: Mapping Bangladesh's Film Ecosystem and Inclusive Growth Potential, and serves on the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting's National Film Grant Subcommittee (2025–2026), the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Program Committee (2024–2025), and the Editorial Board of the Bangladesh Cinema and Television Institute (BCTI) Journal. 

As Convenor of the Bangladesh Culture and Creative Industries Research Group (BCCIRG), he directed the April 2026 conference Nation and its Imagination: Creative and Cultural Industries in Bangladesh. Alongside his academic work, Imran is an active filmmaker, screenwriter, and curator, with productions and exhibitions in London, Sydney, Yogyakarta, Dhaka, and Amsterdam. This dates back to his presidency of the Dhaka University Film Society (2007–2008), where he founded the International Inter-University Short Film Festival (IIUSFF) with the Goethe-Institut, Balkan Shorts, and Berlinale Talents. He also writes for Kali o Kolom, Shilpo o Shipli, Flashback and Depart.