Hilary Rosen Elevated to BAFTA Chair, Ending Sara Putt's Three-Year Term

Hilary Rosen has been promoted to BAFTA chair, succeeding Sara Putt after Putt completed a three-year term in the post. The handover follows the academy's established succession mechanics: the departing chair's deputy steps up, which in this case means Rosen, who served under Putt, now occupies the top job herself.

Rosen inherits oversight of BAFTA's core remit — championing film, games and television talent through its awards, its industry leadership and its year-round development programs. In practical terms, that puts the UKTV executive at the head of the institution that runs the BAFTA Film Awards, the Television Awards, the Craft Awards and the Games Awards, alongside the mentoring and training schemes that feed them.

Who is the new chair?

Rosen's route to the chairmanship runs squarely through the television side of the house. A BAFTA Television Committee member since 2021, she later chaired that committee and, according to the British film and TV academy, helped shape the TV and Craft Awards and oversaw their juries. Four years of committee work, in other words, preceded the promotion.

Her day job complicates any picture of a purely ceremonial figure. Rosen is director of commissioning at UKTV, where she leads the broadcaster's slate of original scripted and unscripted content. A commissioning executive chairing the awards body that honors the industry she commissions from is the kind of arrangement that invites scrutiny — and, presumably, careful governance.

She will not sit alone. Ade Rawcliffe and Andrew Miller join her as deputy chairs of the Academy, both serving two-year terms. The structure preserves the succession pipeline that just carried Rosen herself into the chair.

What changed on the board?

A thorough election process, as the academy described it, produced a wider reshuffle beneath the chair. The new appointments to the Board of Trustees are:

• Charu Desdot — new Chair of BAFTA's Games Committee
• Caroline Levy — new Chair of BAFTA's Television Committee, the post Rosen previously held
• Nahrein Kemp — new Chair of the LIT Committee
• Shrina Shah — chair of the governance and appointments committee, who joins the BAFTA Board of Trustees

Each committee chairmanship matters more than the titles suggest. These committees shape the awards categories, the voting processes and the juries that determine who wins the masks — the mechanics that industry voters and campaigning studios watch closely.

What did Rosen say?

Rosen described the promotion as "a great privilege." Her statement continued: "I have long been passionate about everything BAFTA does to promote the screen arts and champion talent across the screen industries… I am delighted to be able to do this alongside our newly appointed committee chairs, Charu, Caroline and Nahrein and the rest of the BAFTA Board of Trustees. All are outstanding industry leaders, and with the collective passion and insight we share, I'm confident that this Board of Trustees will continue to build on the important and impactful work that has gone before."

The quote is gracious. It is also notably forward-looking, framing the new board as a collective rather than a chair-led hierarchy.

What does the change mean for the race?

Putt's three years are done; Rosen's begin. For the awards-watching community, the practical questions are procedural: whether a chair with deep Television Committee experience tilts attention toward the TV and Craft Awards, and how the new Games and Television committee chairs — Desdot and Levy — adjust the rules, juries and categories under their control. Nothing in the announcement signals rule changes. But chairmanships set tone, and tone tends to trickle into eligibility debates, jury composition and campaign strategy soon enough.

The two-year deputy terms for Rawcliffe and Miller fix the next succession horizon: whoever leads after Rosen will likely emerge from that pair, on the same internal-promotion pattern that produced the current chair.