About

J. Kaitan Lucas is a U.S. Marine veteran, two-time Columbia University graduate and 2019 Student Academy Award winner.

Kaitan enlisted in the Marine Corps in 2003. He was stationed in Okinawa, Japan, Quantico, Virginia, and at the American Embassy in Moscow, Russia.

He received an honorable discharge and went to college on the G.I. Bill. After attending a community college near his hometown of Stamford, Connecticut, Kaitan matriculated at Columbia University where he majored in Film Studies. He graduated magna cum laude in 2014.

For the next four years, Kaitan worked as a producer and assistant director on projects such as “Curmudgeons,” directed by and starring Danny DeVito, and “Alina,” by the late indie film legend, Ben Barenholtz. He also worked on numerous other film, television and commercial projects.

In 2017, Kaitan returned to his alma mater, Columbia, this time as a student of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. There, he specialized in documentary filmmaking. His master’s thesis, Something to Say, a documentary about a young boy with autism who is falling apart emotionally and academically and his family’s fight for a brighter future for him, won a 2019 Student Academy Award for Best Documentary.

In 2018, Kaitan was the Columbia Journalism fellow at Al Jazeera English in Doha, Qatar. Recently, he directed a series of profiles of Google employees who are military veterans. The series was featured on the homepage of Google.com. They have a combined 3.5 million views on YouTube.

Kaitan lives in New York City.