Dr Chrishandra Sebastiampillai is Lecturer in Film, Television and Screen Studies at Monash University Malaysia. She completed her PhD in Film and Television at Monash University, exploring a nationally specific form of stardom in Philippine cinema - the ‘love team’, or the film couple in the early 1970s, a period that coincided with the early stages of Martial Law.

This research builds on her earlier Honours dissertation, which examined a contemporary love team in popular Philippine cinema. Her research on Southeast Asian stardom is ongoing, with a recent paper that investigates Henry Golding’s transnational mixed-race Asian identity in his fledgling career. Currently, she is conducting research on representations of Malaysian heritage houses on screen and the potential of film-induced tourism related to these films and TV series.

She teaches Southeast Asian Cinema at Monash, a unit that focuses on the established and emerging cinemas in the region in addition to Film, Television and Screen Studies: Approaches, an introductory course to the major.

Her research interests include film stardom and celebrity, representations of race and identity in cinema, Philippine cinema and Southeast Asian cinema.

She is particularly interested in how Southeast Asian cinemas have distinct identities while still sharing broad themes across the region that include the struggle for independence, reflecting on colonial histories, building national identities in the aftermath of colonization, and representations of modern individuals that engage with questions of tradition in Southeast Asian societies.

Before joining Monash University Malaysia as a full time lecturer, Chrishandra tutored and lectured extensively within the Film and Communication majors since 2014. For Film Television and Screen Studies (FTVSS), she teaches an introductory course in addition to a third year unit on Southeast Asian cinema. She also lectured for a Masters unit in Communication titled ‘Celebrity, Fashion and Publicity’, and was a sessional lecturer in Sunway University.

Over the years, she has tutored for a range of FTVSS subjects including Film Studies: Forms and Approaches, stardom and celebrity, and film genre. For Communication, she has tutored subjects on communication policy, media, culture and power, and an introductory unit on communication technologies and practices.

Chrishandra believes that teaching should be simple and relatable - that even difficult concepts can be made accessible by using examples that are relevant to the audience. This has in the past included using memes about Captain America to teach the liberal democratic approach to culture, and stick figures to illustrate Althusser’s concept of interpellation.

Dr Chrishandra is interested in supervising projects related to stardom and celebrity, Philippine cinema, race and identity, Malaysian cinema, and Southeast Asian cinema more broadly.

Current supervision

2021 - present: Gwendolyn Aileen Bellinger
'Trickster Spirits and Ghostly Echoes: A Cultural Exploration of Trauma, Memory, and Haunting in Literature' with A/Prof. Andrew Ng Hock Soon.

2023 - present: Prechaya Chaogunha
'Because We are Aa Chee Wa: A Requiem for Vocational Students in Thailand's Political History' with Prof. Michael Kelly Connors and Dr Samson Lim.

2025 - present: Mahendran Balasupramaniam
'(Im)permanent Ways: Place-making, Mobility, and Identity on the East Coast railway line in Malaysia' with A/Prof. Yeoh Seng Guan and Prof Vineeta Sinha.