Full Name Laila Shereen Name Laila Sakr | Occupation artist and theorist Residence Los Angeles | |
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Born November 18, 1971 (age 52) ( 1971-11-18 ) Alexandria, Egypt Education PhD in Media Arts and Practice from University of Southern California, M.F.A. in Digital Arts and New Media from University of California, Santa Cruz, and M.A. in Arab Studies from Georgetown University Known for Creating the award-winning media system, R-Shief (Arabic for 'archive'), and for predicting the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya in August 2001 using Twitter analytics. | ||
Laila Shereen Sakr (born 1971), known by her moniker, VJ Um Amel, is an Egyptian–American digital media theorist and artist. She is the founder of the digital lab, R-Shief, Inc., an Annenberg Fellow, and a PhD candidate in Media Arts + Practice at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts.
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In her manifesto, she writes, "I reappropriate emerging technologies in processes that are both creatively productive and critically analytical to offer insight into how people from different backgrounds and political actors can not only survive, but also become more empowered to create change in an increasingly networked culture." She holds an M.F.A. in Digital Arts and New Media from University of California, Santa Cruz and an M.A. in Arab Studies from Georgetown University.
Work
With a background in documentary film and web development, her current practices include system design, cultural analytics, computational art, video art, and immersive cinema. She is known for building R-Shief, "one of the largest repositories of Arabic-language tweets" and for her predictive analytics of the fall of Qaddafi in Libya in August 2011. This work emerged from her doctoral research and development. For the practical component of her doctoral dissertation, VJ Um Amel archived rare social media collections from the Arab uprising and Occupy movements from 2010–2014. She collaborated with a team of engineers to innovate trending, semantic, sentiment tools that analyze Arabic and seven other languages using machine learning. From the analytics processed from the archives, she created 3D games, documentary video, video remixes, computational drawings, data visualizations, and digital performances shown internationally.
Before developing her career in digital arts and culture, she published and performed poetry under her maiden name, Laila Shereen. She published in journals, and co-founded a couple spoken word collectives in Washington, D.C. including The D.C. Guerrilla Poetry Insurgency and Word of Mouth from 1999–2007. She worked as Multimedia and Publications Editor at Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies during that time. Earlier from 1993–1995, she served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Morocco where she taught English language and literature to university students in Fez at Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University's Faculty of Arts.
Life
She was born in Alexandria, Egypt to Egyptian parents.