Lum Citaku

Adjunct Faculty

RIT Kosovo

lxccad2@rit.edu

Lum Citaku

Adjunct Faculty

RIT Kosovo

Bio

Lum has over two decades of experience as a filmmaker, visual and media artist, and more than ten years as a researcher and cultural manager. He has contributed extensively to film, new media, and anthropologically informed projects as a creative director, researcher, producer, and lecturer.

Holding a Master’s in Visual and Media Anthropology (Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology - Department of Political and Social Sciences) from Freie University Berlin and a BSc from Rochester Institute of Technology in Kosovo, where he lectures in new media studies, anthropology, film, and design, Lum’s practice is situated at the intersection of anthropology and art, integrating creative experimentation with academic inquiry.

As a scholar of EU’s and GoK’s YCS program, Lum joined the Kosovo Cinematography Center in 2019, to continue his contribution to the sector now also from within the institutions and where he has led the main film institution (2021-2023) during the most significant film industry regulation and public funding reform in over 20 years. He is also a member of the European Film Academy.

During 2014-2017 studies situated within the subdiscipline of Digital Anthropology, he expanded on his ‘Dialectics and Aesthetics of Creating with the Digital - An Anthropology of Interface’ - a tempo-historic phenomenology - combination of multisited and sensory ethnographic research, digital ethnography, and interactive film project investigating the lives of digital artists and creators. Lum continues to examine the anthropology - art juncture through sensory, affective and participatory ethnographic methodologies, most recently with the research project under the title “Ontological Epistemologies - An Anthropology of Consciousness, Sentience, and Intimacy in the Thick of the AI Turn”.

Notable film works include “Machinima-film” (2016), “The numerous thoughts and things” - interactive film (2017), “Women of Liberty” (2018) etc.

lxccad2@rit.edu

Currently Teaching

ANTH-430

Visual Anthropology

3 Credits

We see others as we imagine them to be, in terms of our values, not as they see themselves. This course examines ways in which we understand and represent the reality of others through visual media, across the boundaries of culture, gender, and race. It considers how and why visual media can be used to represent or to distort the world around us. Pictorial media, in particular ethnographic film and photography, are analyzed to document the ways in which Indigenous and Native peoples in different parts of the world have been represented or imagined by anthropologists and western popular culture. Throughout, we explore how activists and artists in different parts of the world have produced their own visual media forms to decolonize historical depictions of Indigeneity. This course is discussion, writing, and project oriented, encouraging students to acquire a range of analytical skills through a combination of text interpretation, visual analysis, and verbal expression.

COMM-223

Digital Design in Communication

3 Credits

In an increasingly visual culture, and culture of online user-created content, non-designers are called upon in the professional realm to illustrate their ideas. Graduates entering the workforce will encounter situations where they will benefit from possessing a visual communication sensibility and vocabulary to communicate effectively with a broad range of audiences, including professional designers. Creative approaches to challenges, such as visual thinking, are also shown to improve students’ comprehension and problem-solving abilities. Digital Design in Communication is an opportunity for undergraduates to receive an introduction to principles of visual message design from a critical rhetorical perspective. They will also get the opportunity to apply these principles to a variety of visual products such as advertisements, logos, brochures, resumes, etc. A variety of computer software applications are available to support the research, writing, visualization, and design of messages.

ENGL-410

Film Studies

3 Credits

This course familiarizes students with a number of different critical approaches to film as a narrative and representational art. The course introduces students to the language as well as analytical and critical methodologies of film theory and criticism from early formalist approaches to contemporary considerations of technologies and ideologies alike. Students will be introduced to a selection of these approaches and be asked to apply them to a variety of films selected by the instructor. Additional screening time is recommended.