Ken Lum is a dual citizen Canadian and American academic, painter, photographer, sculptor, and writer. His art ranges from conceptual in orientation to representational in character and is generally concerned with issues of identity in relation to the categories of language, portraiture and spatial politics. A longtime professor, he currently is the Chair of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design in Philadelphia. He was formerly Professor of Art at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver where he was also Head of the Graduate Program in Studio Art; Bard College, Annendale on Hudson, New York, and the l’Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris. Besides English, Lum speaks French and Cantonese Chinese.

Since the mid 1990s, Lum has worked on numerous permanent public art commissions including for the cities of Vienna, the Engadines (Switzerland), Rotterdam, St. Louis, Leiden, Utrecht, Toronto and Vancouver. He has also created temporary public art commissions in Stockholm, Istanbul, Torun (Poland), Innsbruck and Kansas City. Related to his public art, he has written several essays on subject formation and public space. His public art often deals with individual and social identity formation in the context of historical trauma and the complications of official and non-official memory.

Lum holds an honorary doctorate from his undergraduate alma mater, Simon Fraser University. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Award and is a Penn Institute of Urban Research Fellow. In late 2017, Lum was appointed as an Officer of the Order of Canada. For Monument Lab, he was co-receiver of a Knight Foundation grant along with Paul Farber. In 2018, Lum was granted a Pew Fellowship from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage.