2015-16 Arts Production
VBB Artistic Director/ Founder Sehba Sarwar has been leading VBB since its inception. She is a writer, multidisciplinary artist and activist. Her published works include a novel (Black Wings, Alhamra, 2004), and essays, short stories, and poems (in journals, anthologies, and newspapers including the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Callaloo and Asia). Her video collages have been screened in Pakistan, Egypt, India and around the US. Sarwar has been visualizing and producing VBB shows since 1999, and she produces VBB's living room art productions. Contact: sehba<at>vbbarts.org
To learn more about participating artists in VBB's Borderlines series, please visit our interactive website.
2015-16 Publications
Margot Gayle Backus Ph.D serves as co-editor for VBB's Borderlines publications. Backus received her PhD in English literature from the University of Texas-Austin. As Professor of English at the University of Houston, her areas of specialization include postcolonial/empire studies, Marxist theory, and critical sexuality studies. Her publications include The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order, 1999, and Scandal Work: James Joyce, the New Journalism, and the Home Rule Newspaper Wars, 2013. She has worked with Houston Global Awareness, KPFT, and Code Pink, and served as Board member and recently Board President for Voices Breaking Boundaries, 2007-15.
MarĂa C. Gonzalez Ph.D serves as co-editor for VBB's Borderlines publications. Gonzalez is Associate Professor of English at the University of Houston and an authority on Mexican-American literature, Chicana writers, and feminist and queer theory. The author of Contemporary Mexican American Women Novelists: Toward a Feminist Identity, she is currently completing a book on the influence of Chicana lesbian writers and queer theory in Chican@ literary studies. Past president of the National Women's Studies Association and an officer of the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies, she has served on the editorial boards of the NWSA Journal, The Journal of Lesbian Studies, and currently serves on the board of Chicana/Latina Studies Journal.
Anna Saikin Ph.D completed her doctorate from Rice University. Her book project, Reforming Silence, examines the role of didactic silence in Romantic novels written between Pitt's Gagging Acts of the 1790s and the 1832 Reform Act. Her essays, stories, and poems have appeared in Per Contra, Gravel, Vinyl, Bound Off, Teacup Trail, Pleiades, The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies and elsewhere. She is currently a lecturer at the Woman's Institute of Houston and serves managing editor for VBB's Borderlines publications.