I am a popular music researcher based at University College Dublin’s School of Music and the lead for Improvising Across Boundaries. As part of previous research teams, I have worked in partnership with music festivals in Ireland and the UK, to include TradFest, Cork International Choral Festival, Cheltenham Jazz Festival, and Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival. I have also run zine workshops as part of Ideas of Noise and Supersonic, both in Birmingham (UK). I have published books on northern soul (2019 and 2020) and co-edited Towards Gender Equality in the Music Industries (Bloomsbury 2019). I hold several editorial roles and run writing and research workshops for students, academics, music industry professionals, and music fans.

I am the PhD Researcher for Improvising Across Boundaries. An enthusiast of music cultures, a supporter of socially and politically involved arts, and a veteran fan of free improvised music and punk, I have been involved with various alternative independent associations across Europe over the past 20 years. Among them is a long association with the Mediawave Festival in Hungary, where I served in various functions; program curator, international network representative, and festival coordinator. Another example is the Doek collective in Holland, where I was involved in starting a collective community calendar for the local creative music scene. I was also a part of the independent record label Barefoot Records in Denmark as a label and project manager. I am now Review Editor for Jazz Research Journal.

I am the Creative Producer for Improvised Music Company (IMC) and a socially engaged interdisciplinary artist. I began working with IMC in 2012. The current programmes and activities that I manage are strongly feminist and focused on supporting artists in their creative development, initiatives such as Jazz Camp for Girls, NAVIGATOR jazz residency programme and BAN BAM commissioning and development programme for women and gender minority composers in jazz and improvised music.

I am an Associate Professor at University College Dublin, where I teach courses on ethnomusicology, popular music, Indian music, and music and religion. The research that grew out of my PhD (University of Chicago) examines affective publics and Hindu devotional music in Western India. I also also work with punk and underground rock communities in Dublin, investigating issues of place, network, and self-curation. I served served as Chair of ICTM Ireland, and am the co-founder of the National Concert Hall Gamelan Orchestra in Dublin.

I am an Assistant Professor of Creative and Critical Practice at University College Dublin. I currently serve as academic lead for the Creative Futures Academy, a €10 million project funded by Ireland's Human Capital Initiative. Pillai has published widely on jazz and is the author of the monograph Jazz as Visual Language: Film, Television and the Dissonant Image (2016, I. B. Tauris). Between 2017 and 2021, I acted as Managing Editor of the peer-reviewed Jazz Research Journal. In 2017, I was awarded a £170,000 AHRC ECR Research Leadership Fellowship for the project Jazz on BBC-TV 1960-1969. A BBC Four documentary based on his research – Jazz 625 Live: For One Night Only – won Best Music Programme at the 2020 Broadcast Awards. I am currently developing an edited collection entitled Rethinking Miles Davis for Oxford University Press.