Dr. Jeff Roy is a multidisciplinary artist, scholar, and two-time Fulbright Fellow (Fulbright-mtvU and Fulbright-Hays). A trained violinist in the classical musics of Western Europe, South Asia, and the Arab World, Roy creates original compositions that swim in the cinematic soundscapes of classical post/minimalism, world folk, and indie pop.
Roy earned their PhD in ethnomusicology from UCLA (2015) and is an alum of the Project Involve Fellowship Program at Film Independent Los Angeles. Their award-winning films on performance subjects have screened internationally at such institutions as the Director’s Guild of America, Film Society of Lincoln Center, British Film Society, Godrej India Culture Lab, and have been featured in such popular publications as Out Magazine and Vogue India. Their films have been supported by the Fulbright Program, Film Independent, California Humanities, and Godrej Industries.
Roy’s scholarly writings appear in the journals Ethnomusicology, Ethnomusicology Forum, Feminist Review, MUSICultures, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Transgender Studies Quarterly, and in the books Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology and Remapping Sound Studies. Roy’s collaborative book Badhai: Hijra-Khwaja Sira-Trans Performances Across Borders in South Asia examines the repertoire of devotional prayers, songs, dances, and comic repartee performed by the socially marginalized hijra–khwaja sira -trans communities of Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. Roy’s next book, provisionally titled Jamming the Script: Performance, Film, and Queer Possibilities in India, builds on this investigation to examine filmmaking as a research methodology and artistic practice within and across India’s transgender, hijra, and queer-identified communities. Gathering sources on the history of place-based filmmaking in South Asia and using audio-visual footage from their own films produced in the field, the book explores film’s legacy of colonialism and shows how queer filmmaking offers different possibilities of knowing and working through the forms, temporal arrangements, places and processes of scholarly and artistic inquiry.