David Heslin is a writer and editor living in Melbourne, Australia. He edits the Australian quarterly film magazine Metro, and has previously served as editor of Screen Education, as subeditor of Metro and as a member of the Senses of Cinema editorial team. He has also worked as a freelance copy editor for literary journal Overland and interned at news and opinion site The Conversation.

David was born and raised in Canberra, Australia, before moving to Melbourne at the age of 20. In 2011, he was appointed editor-in-chief of the Monash University student magazine Esperanto. This experience – together with his long-held ambition of being a film critic – led him to apply for RMIT’s Professional Writing and Editing program, a degree which he commenced part-time in 2013.

In 2014, David contributed annotations on a trio of classic European films for Senses of Cinema. He also began writing synopses for the Melbourne International Film Festival program guide, and conducted video interviews with filmmakers including Catherine Breillat, Joe Swanberg and Rolf De Heer, which were published on the Melbourne International Film Festival website. 2014 was bookended by two other film-related achievements: in February, his short film Lake Tantalus was screened at Adelaide’s 9:16 Film Festival, while his video essay collaboration with Chris Luscri – Out 1: From Conspiracy to Conspiracy – was selected by internationally renowned film critic Kevin B. Lee as one of the best five video essays of the year.

In 2015, David was selected to be part of the Melbourne International Film Festival’s second Critics Campus, a week-long intensive mentoring and development program. As part of this, six of his film reviews and one feature were published across The Age and the festival’s website. He graduated from his degree in 2016, and edited both Screen Education and Senses of Cinema’s Cteq Annotations section from 2017 to 2020. In 2020, he began editing Metro, Australia’s oldest film publication.

David lives in Hampton with his partner and their young son.