Laila Shereen Sakr is an artist/scholar who uses the moniker VJ (video jockey) Um Amel. She is the creator of R-Shief and a PhD candidate in Media Arts & Practice at USC's School of Cinematic Arts. Her practices include live cinema performance, visual art, and network analysis. Focused on the Arab world, her doctoral work maps the Arab revolutions through semantic analysis of social media feeds in Arabic, Persian, French, English, Spanish, German, and (soon) Urdhu. She has shown at the San Francisco MoMA, National Gallery of Art in Jordan, Camera Austria, Cultura Digital in Brazil, DC Fridge Art Gallery, Tech@State, +. Previously, she has published poetry as Laila Shereen. Past awards include the ADC Jack Shaheen Media Scholarship, Porter College Graduate Research Grant, Florence French Scholarship, UC Regents’ Fellowship, Puffin’ Grant, and the Washington Peace Center Peace and Justice Award. With an M.A. in Arab Studies from Georgetown University and an M.F.A. in Digital Arts and New Media from University of California, Santa Cruz, this VJ is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Media Arts and Practice at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. There, she has been awarded an Annenberg Fellowship and nominated as a MacArthur Foundation HASTAC scholar. Recent interviews and reviews have been published in Egypt Independent, Fast Company, Science, The Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch, Al-Masry Al-Youm, the Digital Media and Learning, Art Territories, and The Creators Project.

Location

Los Angeles

Disciplines

• Digital Humanities
• Film Studies
• Performing Arts
• Visual Arts
• Area Studies
• Information Science and Technology
• Library and Museum Studies

Affiliation

University of Southern California

Website

http://vjumamel.com