Jeff Roy, PhD is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and two-time Fulbright Fellow (Fulbright-mtvU and Fulbright-Hays). A trained violinist with a performance background in the classical musics of Europe, South Asia, and the Arab World, Roy writes and releases original compositions with the support of the modern neoclassical record label enjou (formerly Little Symphony Records).

Roy earned their PhD and MA in ethnomusicology from UCLA (2015; 2011) and a BA in comparative arts from Washington University in St. Louis (2007). In 2013, Roy was selected for the Project Involve Fellowship Program at Film Independent Los Angeles, participating alongside and under the mentorship of notable contemporary filmmakers in the industry. Since 2011, Roy’s 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 publications as Out Magazine, Vogue India, and The Huffington Post. Roy’s films have been supported by the Fulbright Program, Film Independent, California Humanities, and Godrej Industries. 

Roy’s films and scholarly publications center the politics and performance of queer and trans-hijra-gender expansive cultural formations at the intersections of race, class, caste, and religion in South Asia. Roy recently guest-edited the themed issue “Queer Elsewheres ←→ South Asian Imaginaries” in Feminist Review (2023) and co-authored the book Badhai: Hijra-Khwaja Sira-Trans Performances Across Borders in South Asia (2022) which examines the repertoire of devotional prayers, songs, dances, and comic repartee performed by hijra–khwaja sira-trans communities of Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. Roy’s scholarly writings also appear in the journals Asian Music, Ethnomusicology, Ethnomusicology Forum, Feminist Review, MUSICultures, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Transgender Studies Quarterly, World Policy Journal, and in the books Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology and Remapping Sound Studies. Roy’s next book, provisionally titled Jamming the Script: Performance, Film, and Queer Possibilities in India, builds on this body of work to examine filmmaking as a research methodology and artistic practice within and across India’s trans-hijra and queer 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.