History isn't lost — it's just been hidden from view.
Santilla Chingaipe is a Zambian-born filmmaker, historian and author whose work excavates the stories Australia has long chosen to forget.
Her debut book of non-fiction, Black Convicts, was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and longlisted for the prestigious Cundill History Prize, cementing her place among Australia's most important historians.
The critically acclaimed documentary inspired by the book, Our African Roots — streaming on SBS On Demand — made history as the first time an African-Australian host interrogated the nation's colonial past on Australian television.
A former SBS World News journalist, Santilla spent nearly a decade reporting across Africa, interviewing some of the continent's most prominent leaders while also covering Australia's diverse African diasporic communities with depth and nuance.
Her influence extends well beyond Australia's borders. In 2019, she was recognised by the United Nations as one of the most influential people of African descent in the world. She has delivered the annual E.W. Cole Lecture at the Wheeler Centre, published internationally in The New York Times, The Guardian and the BBC, and is a regular contributor to The Saturday Paper and a columnist for The Monthly.
Santilla is also a committed champion of inclusive storytelling. She is the founder of Behind The Screens, an annual VicScreen-supported program increasing representation for people historically excluded from the Australian film industry.
She hosts two monthly cultural events: the literary series First Chapter and its sister event, No Skips: A Listening Party.
Talking Points
Storytelling as resistance
From documentary filmmaking to long-form journalism, Santilla can reflect on the craft and ethics of telling stories that powerful institutions would prefer stayed hidden. Relevant for media, arts, and creative industries audiences.
Storytelling as resistance
Who gets to write History?
Drawing on her research into Australia's African convicts and her E.W. Cole Lecture, Santilla challenges audiences to interrogate whose voices shape the official record — and what we all lose when history is written by only one hand. A powerful provocation for anyone working in education, media, culture, or leadership.
Who gets to write History?
Truth-Telling and the Power of Untold Stories
How do we reckon with a past that has been deliberately obscured? Santilla explores the personal, political and cultural stakes of truth-telling in Australia, and why confronting uncomfortable histories is essential to building a fairer future.
Truth-Telling and the Power of Untold Stories
Representation On Screen and On the Page
As founder of Behind The Screens, Santilla speaks with authority on why diversity in storytelling matters — not just morally, but creatively and economically. A sharp, evidence-based case for inclusion in film, media, and publishing.
Representation On Screen and On the Page
Migration, Identity and Belonging in Modern Australia
Drawing on her own journey and years of reporting on African communities in Australia, Santilla examines what it really means to belong — and how Australia's national identity is richer and more complex than the dominant narrative allows.
Migration, Identity and Belonging in Modern Australia
Race, Risk and the Australian Government's Blind Spot
Santilla has written about how Australia's official travel guidance ignores racial, cultural and religious diversity — exposing how race functions within bureaucratic definitions of who counts as "Australian." This is a sharp, evidence-based keynote for government, public policy, legal, and DEI audiences about the invisible assumptions baked into institutions.
Race, Risk and the Australian Government's Blind Spot
Video
Santilla Chingaipe: Black Convicts
Roxane Gay with Santilla Chingaipe
Roxane Gay's latest book, a collection of short fiction called Difficult Women. The pages of the book are populated with resilient, perverse, bold, provocative, hilarious and heroic female characters. It's some of these very same qualities that have propelled Gay herself to feminist stardom. As a writer, and as a distinctly 21st-century voice in American feminism, Gay embraces complexity and contradiction and packs a powerful rhetorical punch whether she's writing for Twitter, Tumblr, the New York Times, novels or comic books. The academic, essayist and novelist rose to prominence in 2015 with the book Bad Feminist - part manifesto, part memoir, part cultural critique - and today has more than 190,000 Twitter followers, tuning in to her thoughts on everything from The Bachelor to American higher education policy. Most recently, she's been working on an upcoming memoir, Hunger, and co-authoring a Marvel comic, Black Panther: World of Wakanda, with Yona Harvey and Ta-Nehisi Coates. At the Northcote Town Hall, hear the singular Roxane Gay talk Trump, diversity on Australian TV, Beyoncé and lifestyle feminism with Santilla Chingaipe.In Conversation with Santilla Chingaipe
Santilla Chingaipe is rewriting History
Who gets to write History?
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