Personal information

Full name

Laila Shereen Sakr

Country

Egypt

Bio

Laila Shereen Sakr is a media artist and critic known as VJ Um Amel. Recent reviews of her work have been published in The Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch, Al-Masry Al-Youm, the Digital Media and Learning blog, Art Territories, and The Creators Project. As a doctoral student, Ms. Sakr joined the research team at the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab to develop semantic web technologies in order to survey the importance of social media in political change. Her data visualizations have also been shown at the “interACTIVATE” exhibition at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The model she built for R-Shief won the 2011 CRUNCH Design Challenge at the Annenberg Innovation Lab, and her digital Gaza archive earned her the 2009 American-Arab Anti-Discrimination (ADC) Media Scholarship Award. As a poet, she is published as Laila Shereen. She has co-founded spoken word and hip-hop collectives in Washington, D.C. - Guerrilla Poetry Insurgency and Word of Mouth. Shereen Sakr holds 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. In 2010, she was nominated as a Macarthur Foundation HASTAC scholar. She is pursuing a Ph.D. in Media Arts and Practice at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts, where she has been awarded an Annenberg Fellowship.

Projects

R-Shief - http://r-shief.org,

VJ Um Amel - http://vjumamel.com,

Attended Arab Techies Women Gathering, Jounieh, May 2010

History

Member for

1 year 41 weeks