Heitor Augusto has been working in the intersections of curatorship and film programming, writing, and researching since 2008. Some of his most acknowledged curatorial projects are A Two-Way Conversation: Bridging Black Brazilian and Black American Experimental Films (Highball.TV, 2022), América Negra: Conversas entre as negritudes latino-americanas (NICHO 54, 2021), and Cinema Negro: Capítulos de uma história fragmentada (FestCurtasBH, 2018). Cinema Negro is the largest retrospective to this day to take on the mission to provide an extensive view on the short films directed by Black Brazilian filmmakers throughout the last five decades.

His writing has covered a variety of films and topics, also serving as a reflection of the shift in the conversation around cinema during the last 15 years, particularly in Brazil. His perspectives have been featured at C&, Seen, CineLimite, Brasil de Fato, Interlúdio, Teorema, among others. He has also written for book collections, film retrospectives’ catalogs and scholarly publications, such as SCMS’ Journal of Cinema and Media Studies.

Augusto currently serves as a short films programmer for BlackStar Festival (Philadelphia, USA) and has been part of multiple programming teams for Brazilian film festivals.

He is also a Co-founder and Head of Programming for NICHO 54, an institute working toward the promotion and appreciation of Black Brazilians in the film industry, with an emphasis on supporting the career of Black people in positions of creative, intellectual and economic leadership. Since 2019 he has served as the curator of NICHO Novembro, the organization’s yearly festival.

A member of the Programmers of Colour Collective, Augusto has been a member of multiple juries for festivals and funds, such as the Berlinale’s Teddy Award (2020), Mostra de Cinema de Tiradentes (2017), and the William Greaves Research & Development Fund (2021-22).

Some of the topics that inform his practice are challenging the binary division between positive versus negative representation; community building and appreciation of Black spectatorships; rearranging the hierarchies guiding how we apprehend and perceive film history; reshaping the collective imagination around Black lives in film; and an interlocution with people of African descent.