Leila Sujir was born in Hyderabad, India, and moved to Quebec in Canada as a child. She first studied literature at the University of Alberta (Bachelor of Arts), and then moved immediately into film production as a young artist, working with the documentary form with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. Later, she studied post-colonial and post-modern theory at a graduate level with visiting poets and theorists Eli Mandel (1985) and Robert Kroetsch (1979) at the University of Calgary. Within video as a form, she found she was able to achieve a collage structure. Sujir’s video art works have been shown in group shows at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate Gallery in Liverpool, England as well as galleries and festivals all over the world. Her works are in collections, including the National Gallery of Canada (four video artworks), the Glenbow (two video art installations and one video artwork), the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery (one video art installation), and numerous library collections. Select publications include curator and editor Srimoyee Mitra’s “Border Cultures” (2016), and curators Katherine Ylitalo and Nancy Tousley, with editor Melanie Kjorlien’s “Made in Calgary: An Exploration of Art from 1960 to the 2000’s “(2016). A new publication from the Houston, Texas Fotofest Biennial is now available: “India: Contemporary Photographic and New Media Art” by curators Sunil Gupta and Steve Evans (2018).

Leila Sujir is Chair of the Studio Arts Department at Concordia University in the Faculty of Fine Arts, and an associate professor in the Intermedia area (Video, Performance, and Electronic Arts). In 2005 through 2006, she was a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Calgary, a one-year research position as an artist in the Interactions Lab in the Department of Computer Science. She recently received a three-year Social Sciences Humanities Research grant, “Exploring Elastic 3D Spaces: Bodies and Belonging” (2016-2019).