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Biography
Laila Shereen Sakr is Associate Professor of Media Theory and Practice at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research in media analytics and creative scholarship have deployed the idea, experimentation, and aesthetics of glitch to make a series of conceptual points culminating in her single-authored book, Arabic Glitch: Technoculture, Data Bodies, and Archives (Stanford University Press, 2023). At UCSB, she co-founded Wireframe, a studio promoting collaborative theoretical and creative media practice with investments in global, social, and environmental justice. She is Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Feminist Studies, Department of Media Arts and Technology, Center for Responsible Machine Learning, Center for Middle East Studies, and the Center for Information Technology and Society.
Sakr is engaged in an ongoing posthuman performance of VJ Um Amel, cyborg, and VJ “Mother of Hope.” As a producer and scholar of emergent media, machine learning, and AI, she writes, develops software, and produces data visualization and digital art to analyze technology, language, and contemporary global culture. As VJ Um Amel, she has shown internationally in solo and group exhibitions and performances at galleries and museums, including the San Francisco MoMA, Fridge Art Gallery in Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art in Jordan, Camera Austria, Cultura Digital in Brazil, Kirchner Cultural Centre in Argentina, Tahrir Cultural Center in Egypt, Lagos Biennial in Nigeria, and the Qualcomm Institute in San Diego.
Over the last two decades, she has been a leading voice in the open-source movement, particularly for Arabic localization. In 2009, she launched the R-Shief media system that went on to archive over seventy billion social media posts in seventy-two languages and developed software to analyze multi-dimensional data. She is a Co-Editor for the open-access journal Media Theory, and for After Video published by Open Humanities Press. She is also an editorial board member of Punctum Books. Reviews of her work appear in dozens of publications.
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