VJ Um Amel
VJ Um Amel — Laila Shereen Sakr — builds the tools, archives, and artworks that make the cyborg body of data visible. From R-Shief (archive of over 80 billion social media posts in 72 languages), to Arabic Glitch: Technoculture, Data Bodies, and Archives (Stanford University Press, 2023), to Contrapuntal (an AI platform for building and sharing datasets, measuring bias, and generating creative visualization), she extends her work at the intersection of AI, art, and global media into a new generation of creative, critical infrastructure.
Timeline
Publications
State Futurism vs. Critical Futurism. In Myrna Ayad, editor, What's Between, Between? Gulf Futures: An Edited Volume of Essays, Dialogues, and Opinions. Silvana Editoriale, 2026.
Glitching Tradition: Arab Digital Art at the Crossroads of Innovation and Resistance. In Haytham Nawar, editor, The Archaeology of New Media Arts in the Arab World, Hatje Cantz, 2026.
Applying Data Feminism Principles to Assess Bias in English and Arabic NLP Research. FAccT '25: Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, ACM, 2025.
“When Data Bodies Become Targets: New Risks in a Networked World,” Tech Policy, November 4, 2024.