Tito Ambyo is a media anthropologist, journalist and lecturer at the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, and a member of the History, Memory and Decolonial Futures collective at the University of Melbourne. Prior to completing his PhD—with a thesis on Digital Hantulogi examining Indonesian horror content producers on YouTube through digital ethnography—he worked as a political journalist at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

His research focuses on haunting, ecology, memory and media in Southeast Asia and Australia. At KITLV, he is researching the haunting of extinct animals, taking the Javan tiger as his central case. Though officially extinct, the tiger is never absent: it survives in Indonesian cosmology as siluman, spirit-tigers and were-tigers moving between worlds, and in colonial archives and museums. It persists too in Indonesian popular culture — in films, on social media, in monuments, even as a football club mascot — and in its ecological absence, through a landscape still reorganising itself around the loss of its apex predator. The project argues that colonialism produced a double extinction: the biological destruction of the tiger, and the delegitimisation of the Indonesian knowledge systems through which people relate to animals. The research continues his earlier work on how colonial violence creates ghosts that live on and change through media practices and platforms, and it will form part of a broader book proposal on human relationships with extinct and endangered animals through anthropology.

Tito is also a co-host of the Talking Indonesia podcast and a co-founder of Nongkrong, an Indonesian-Australian collective that runs Indonesian food, arts and music events exploring questions of Indonesian diaspora identities in Australia.