Filmmaker. Historian. Writer.

Santilla Chingaipe is a filmmaker, historian and writer.

Her multidisciplinary practice, rooted in scholarship and spanning moving image, history and the literary arts, interrogates mobility, memory, erasure and identity.

She spent nearly a decade reporting for SBS World News, covering stories across Africa and interviewing some of the continent's most prominent leaders, while also reporting extensively on Australia's diverse African diasporic communities.

Chingaipe's first book of non-fiction, Black Convicts: How Slavery Shaped Australia, was shortlisted for The Stella Prize and long-listed for the Cundill History Prize, and was published in Australia in 2024, with a UK release later in 2026. The book inspired her ground-breaking, multi-award-winning documentary Our African Roots (2021), which explored Australia's forgotten Black African history and marked the first time an African-Australian host interrogated the nation's colonial history on Australian television.

Her other screen credits include the ABC documentary series Third Culture Kids (2019), and the short films The Dancer(2020) and Black As Me (2018). She is currently in development on her directorial debut feature Umuzimu (Spirit), produced by acclaimed Australian director Robert Connolly and Tessa Mansfield-Hung.

Chingaipe is a regular contributor to The Saturday Paper and a columnist for The Monthly. In 2023, she delivered the annual E.W. Cole Lecture on "Who Gets to Write History?"

She is the founder of Behind The Screens, an annual program supported by VicScreen aimed at increasing representation of people historically excluded from the Australian film industry, and hosts two monthly cultural events: the literary series First Chapter and its sister event, No Skips: A Listening Party.

Among her many honours, Chingaipe was recognised at the United Nations in 2019 as one of the most influential people of African descent in the world under 40.

She was born in Livingstone, Zambia, and lives and works in Melbourne, Australia.