Biography

Over the last forty years, Canadian artist Leila Sujir, born in India,  has been building a body of video art works exploring family histories and Canadian histories, using visual and audio collage techniques. Often located within custom-built technologies both for the production as well as its exhibition presentation, in the artworks, Sujir brings together a blend of visual and acoustic elements employing documents from archival sources, fiction, and the fantastic. Her video art works have been shown in group shows at the Museum of Modern Art (New York) and the Tate Gallery (Liverpool). Exhibited in galleries all over the world, her work is in collections including National Gallery of Canada and Glenbow.

Leila Sujir is a professor emerita in the Studio Arts Department, in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University, where she began as an Associate Professor, Studio Arts (1998). She took a leave of absence in 2005-20025 to take a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Calgary’s Computer Science Department, in the Interactions Lab. She works with an art research studio-lab at Concordia University, Elastic 3D Spaces, where she has received SSHRC research grants including “Elastic Forest Spaces” (2024) and “Thinking Allowed” (2022); a Canada Council for the Arts, Concept to Realization, Media Arts (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). She received a B.A. in Literature from the University of Alberta (1972).