Laila Shereen Sakr is engaged in an ongoing posthuman performance as VJ Um Amel, a cyborg and VJ “Mother of Hope.” She writes, develops software, and produces multimodal art to theorize technology, language, and the body. Author of Arabic Glitch: Technoculture, Data Bodies, and Archives (Stanford University Press, 2023), Sakr is Associate Professor of Media Theory & Practice at the University of California, Santa Barbara. 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. As VJ Um Amel, she has shown internationally in solo and group exhibitions and performances at galleries and museums. 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 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 NecsusJournal, The Wall Street Journal, Science, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Fast Company, The Huffington Post, The Guardian, Voice of America, Al-Ahram, Art Territories, Digital Media and Learning, Egypt Independent, Medium, Mada Masr, Jadaliyya, and The Creators Project.

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