Over the last forty years, Leila Sujir has been building a body of video art works using a mix of fiction, fantasy and documentary with visual and audio collage techniques. Her video art works have been shown in group shows at the Museum of Modern Art (New York) and the Tate Gallery  (Liverpool), as well as galleries all over the world. Her work is in collections including the National Gallery of Canada and the Glenbow Museum.

She will be working on a new video work in progress, ‘forest documents’ with technical director Jorge Zavagno, for 2 weeks July-August 2023, at the Leighton Artists’ Studios at the Banff Centre.

Current exhibitions include, Those That Came Before Us, with Sujir’s video work Peacocks Dream (2018) at the Mackenzie Art Gallery, June – September 2023, curated by Ana Ferguson. Recent exhibitions include Super Women: Conversations with Real Action Figures with curator Midi Onodera in the CFMDC symposium The Breadth of (2021), with her video work, The Dreams of the Night Cleaners (1995); Outer Worlds with curator Janine Marchessault (2019) at the Cinesphere IMAX theatre with her video Aerial (2019);  the Fotofest Biennial in Houston, Texas, in INDIA – Contemporary Photographic and New Media Art (2018) with curators Sunil Gupta and Steven Evans, with her video, Peacocks Dream (2018); Supernatural: Art, Technology and the Forest (2018) with curator Haema Sivanesan at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, British Columbia and The Garden in the Machine (2019) with curator Jordan Strom at the Art Gallery of Surrey, British Columbia with Sujir’s video work, Forest Breath (2018).

Leila Sujir is a professor emeritus in the Studio Arts Department, Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University. She works with an art research studio-lab based at Concordia University, Elastic 3D Spaces, that most recently received a SSHRC research grant, Thinking Allowed (2022); a Canada Council production grant (2022) for forest documents, and prior to that,  a SSHRC research grant, Elastic 3D Spaces: the old growth forest as ‘home’ space with an emphasis on land, healing, home, communities (2019). In a recent publication from Oxford University Press, Practices of Projection (2020),  she co-wrote a chapter with fellow researcher and artist Anthony Head, “Researching virtual, augmented and mixed realities, or how the Elastic 3D Spaces project emerged from an outdoor projection event.”

Select publications on her work include the following:

–Peacocks Dream in Moving Focus, India (2022);

-India Hearts Beat and Forest Breath in a book project from the Surrey Art Gallery, TechLab: Experiments in Media Art 1999-2019 (2022));

-an essay by Haema Sivanesan in the Journal of Transcultural Studies, “Unsettling the Picturing of the Canadian Old Growth Forest: Consent, Consultation and (Re)conciliation in Leila Sujir’s Forest!” (2021);

 –a chapter by Nancy Tousley,”Leila Sujir’s forest of pixels,” in the book Intertwined Histories: Plants in Their Social Contexts from the University of Calgary Institute for the Humanities (2019);

-Sunil Gupta and Steve Evans’ book from the Houston, Texas Fotofest Biennial:  India: Contemporary Photographic and New Media Art by (2018);

-Srimoyee Mitra’s book Border Cultures (2016);

-Katherine Ylitalo and Nancy Tousley, with Melanie Kjorlien’s book Made in Calgary: An Exploration of Art from 1960 to the 2000’s (2016).